


Raybreaker

by vanitaslaughing



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers Spoilers, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Calamity, backstory speculation, leads into shadowbringers eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2020-10-12 04:08:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20557985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanitaslaughing/pseuds/vanitaslaughing
Summary: In a world devastated by a Calamity, G'raha Tia wakes up.He wakes up, and he doesn't know what to do, what to think. A blank slate, a living and breathing remnant of not one but two civilisations now.And thus, he joins those who woke him on their quest.





	1. ACT I - A Realm in Ruins

For the first few minutes, all they could do was look around in awed silence. No matter how detailed the reports from back then were, nothing could have prepared them for the sight of pristine blue and gold, glittering in even the dim light. Dust danced through the air as they moved about slowly, their boots clicking on the crystal floor and the vast empty space making every step echo like a deep rumble that might crack the almost fragile-looking blue stone. But they knew better than that. This tower had stood here for years, an ominous holdover of an empire long since gone.

Once the awe had passed, they looked at the stairs leading up and down, round and round. The inside of this place was overwhelming, not something they had ever seen in the many years they spent wandering Eorzea in an attempt to find something to help them open the doors. In the end they had managed, somehow, through a mixture of both brute force and technical genius—the mechanism had responded and stopped at a certain point, and that was when they decided that perhaps the time for being careful to not set off any traps was over. Besides, he had reasoned before giving the thing a good smack, it wasn’t as if the majority of these traps were still in place.

They had been disarmed, after all. It was a story that many people told whenever the restless wanderers that had no interest in the endless tides of war that consumed the planet met on the road. How the Warrior of Light blazed a path through the Crystal Tower with a weapon held aloft and naught but scientists at their side. And whatever traps were left, surely someone would have discovered and disarmed them afterwards, between the doors opening and the doors falling shut for one last time.

Now they were open.

The moment had passed, and they looked around. They had no idea where to start looking, whether they needed to go up or down. The winding crystalline staircases and the fine dust did not give away anything but their own footsteps and nothing called for them or even watched them.

In the end, they all spread a little. If anything looked remotely dangerous or alive, they were to immediately contact the others via linkshell, and no one was to touch anything that looked like it had any value. Machines were to be left alone, any sort of mechanisms were to be ignored no matter what. There would be time to deal with all of this later—what they needed to find now was just one little thing. The beating heart of the tower. Whether awake or not, that mysterious person was their main priority, and thus they split up to hopefully find that mystery man. Or he would find them.

The hours passed. Even through the crystalline walls he could hear that heavy rain had started outside—the dim light grew ever dimmer as daylight faded.

The sheer amount of crystal blue and pure gold was baffling. Everything else that the Allagans had built that still survived to this day and age seemed military and drab, more practical and destructive than pleasant to the eyes. But everything in here told a story of riches and megalomaniacs; who else but the rich and the insane built a spire of pure crystal with aetheric properties that reached to the very heavens and shone so overwhelmingly blue? He huffed as his hands followed the gold markings on yet another door. To think that this very structure had been the catalyst to cause an earthquake of such magnitude that it shook more than Allag, to think that this very Crystal Tower was the reason for a rejoining of the same magnitude as what the world faced now. It seemed so ridiculous looking at the finely crafted and lovingly decorated crystal.

He pushed the door open, expecting naught more than more endless blue.

He revealed a room unlike the ones he had been in before, however. It seemed like it might have been a war conference room with a most peculiar pattern on the ground. As he slowly walked in and about, he realised that this was likely not a war conference room but a room where scientists experimented. The floor pattern was clearly a representation of the Source and the Shards—of course Allag would have figured that out and then kept that knowledge a secret, so when Calamity struck the knowledge that there were more worlds than the Source would vanish until once again people figured it out. The link to the Void made it impossible to be forgotten entirely, after all.

He looked at the crystalline mirror up ahead. Something told him there was a lot more to this thing than it let on right now, but he was not a specialist on anything like it. It was safe to assume that every little bit that looked odd was part of a larger mechanism—Allag’s creations were like this. There was no useless bit.

He looked around the room and half expected it to be completely empty, but his eyes instead fell upon another door. It melded into the walls of this place; if someone merely turned around without looking properly then there was almost no way that they would see it. For all intents and purposes it was yet another door in the Crystal Tower that had had its doors closed for so long, but something drew him in. They were here for a reason, and none of his colleagues and friends had reported anything of interest yet. It seemed as if everything in this place was held in stasis—of course one pair had run into good old Allagan clones held somewhere in the deeper reaches of the tower, but nothing in there stirred or responded and the machines themselves seemed fully functional but somehow the consoles were locked.

He pushed the door open slowly, almost hesitantly. Part of him expected absolutely nothing, the other part expected to find something truly outrageous. Perhaps Chief Garlond in perfect health and youth rather than the long dead author of the notes they were following. Perhaps a Warrior of Light to follow in the footsteps of the one that was also long since dead. Perhaps a voidsent, perhaps a spirit that was the Black Rose that still lingered and made entire stretches of Gyr Abania naught more than a wasteland devoid of any life.

What he found instead was a small room. A fine layer of dust covered everything, from the console that glowed with a vague greyish light to the ground.

The dust even covered the Miqo’te curled up on the ground.

He looked around some more, then his brain quite literally short-circuited. He looked back at the ground.

Indeed, there was a fairly young Miqo’te lying there, covered in dust. But even that dust did not make his red hair stand against the crystalline blue any less crassly—it looked as if someone had spilled a healthy amount of blood or red dye on the ground there. He dropped to his knees, half tempted to check for a pulse; but usually whenever they checked for a pulse then the person was already long gone. Still, he compelled his hands to move despite the fear that the man would be dead.

He immediately jerked his hand back when he felt a very faint heartbeat. That Miqo’te was alive. _Alive._

Not a clone in a pod, not a machine. Now that he looked closer, he could see that he bore several tattoos…. He reached for the other man’s shoulder and shook him slightly.

No reaction.

Alive but unconscious.

He reached for the linkshell and activated it. “I think I found the control room. There’s someone here, but they’re not waking up.”

The others replied, and for a few minutes a loud discussion started. The stranger on the floor did not stir the slightest as if he didn’t hear the ruckus. Gods, he almost didn’t want to disturb that man’s sleep. If he truly was the man who had locked this tower up after the 7th Calamity, then he had no idea what had happened a few years after that. He had closed the doors in the wake of the Astral Era and would now be waking up in an Umbral Era that had lasted more than two hundred years at this point. No one, not a single soul, deserved waking up to this sort of tragedy. Especially not someone who had known a handful people who died quite horrid deaths back then.

“_Chief Biggs, do you copy? We’re returning to camp, bring him there. We can discuss this better in person.”_

“… Aye. I’ll be seeing you there, then.”

He half expected the man to be heavy, dead weight. But no. He was limp and surprisingly light for a Miqo’te of his build, his limbs dangling uselessly. Hells, he hadn’t seen a Miqo’te that small his whole life—most of them were taller and broader than this guy.

He made sure that the sleeping Miqo’te wouldn’t bounce too much, and then hurried back out. Back down the stairs.

The crystal was suddenly less awe-inspiring and more served as a reminder that this thing had withstood many, many things. Too many things.

* * *

He could still see the control console sitting in front of him. This little thing controlled whether the tower was active or not, and with an almost heavy heart he had put it into sleep mode. Whatever happened next he had no idea, but by all logic he should have fallen asleep. Right where he stood.

In the middle of the Crystal Tower, amidst bright blue and gold, in the still air of a building that had not been disturbed for many years.

Thus it was the gentle breeze that eventually woke him, sent him sitting up so quickly that his vision turned blurry and starry and his stomach immediately revolted. Perhaps not the most graceful way of waking, emptying an already empty stomach onto the ground, but at least it made made any sort of grogginess fade nigh immediately. Retching horrendously, he realised that… he was _outside._ He wasn’t supposed to be outside, and he hiccuped awkwardly while his body could not decide whether to throw up more bile or to finally let him breathe properly.

Only then did he notice the people staring at him, and for a moment he prayed the Fourth Calamity would revisit this place to swallow him up in shifting earth. But alas, naught of the sort happened and he closed his eyes.

“My… my apologies,” he croaked awkwardly, voice strained, broken and quiet.

He slowly raised a hand to draw it through his hair; then looked around. The ground and the lake nearby gave away the fact that he was still in Mor Dhona, close enough to hear Silvertear Lake splash against the rock and crystal but definitely not in the main settlement. As he turned a bit more, he saw the Crystal Tower pierce up into the heavy grey clouds that warned of an oncoming thunderstorm that would soon rock the region—he dragged a hand down his face with a small groan as he tried to parse where he was. The ground seemed… scorched. The air felt stagnant and overwhelmingly strange to him, and his already drooping ears went flat against his head as he jumped to his feet and looked around.

“Where… where am I?”

Finally it registered—these people wore uniforms not unlike those of the Garlond Ironworks. Indeed, the engineers looked at each other with expressions that he couldn’t quite read, until finally a Roegadyn man bade him sit back down. He very, very hesitantly did so, and the unreadable expressions changed to something that almost resembled pity across the faces of everyone except for the Roegadyn man.

“What was it called again… Saint Coinach’s Find? In Mor Dhona, in any case.”

His blood froze in his veins. This couldn’t be the Find. His eyes darted about—there were only ruins and scorched stone. A shudder went through his body as he looked around once more to take in what had just been presented to him. Back in the day it had been barely more than a camp with tents, though Rammbroes had cheerfully said that perhaps they ought to make it into a proper settlement. Such plans had been made by the time he had formally introduced himself to the Warrior of Light, and by the time they had set out for the top of the Tower once more to save Doga, Unei and Nero there had been the first foundations for a handful buildings. Perhaps they had been finished afterwards, but that did not explain the… ruins.

“And how—“

A stupid question, and he clamped his mouth shut. The answer was obvious—if they were truly members of the Ironworks then they would have known that the doors to the Crystal Tower could be opened and that they would find at least one Spoken who was not hostile inside.

One pitiful expression changed into an almost amused one, were it not for the sadness still in that Raen woman’s eyes. “With a lot of research, trial, error, and eventually a good smack. No door can resist a good smack.”

He closed his eyes to get rid of these pitiful looks he was receiving and nodded. “I see.” Somehow he doubted that ‘a good smack’ would have done it; these people sounded rather humble for a group that had managed to enter the Crystal Tower that he had so dutifully locked… when, exactly? When had he locked the door and parted with NOAH?

That was the question that he was scared of, the one that floated unanswered in this makeshift camp of haphazardly set up tents that had no distinguishing features and looked rather well-worn. They were all waiting for him to ask it, he was scared to get an answer to what pounded in the back of his head. If they did not know Saint Coinach’s Find then it would be rather far into the future.

He sat still there for a long while, heard them ask if he had fallen asleep again. One voice said something about letting him be for the time being, and soon after he heard the clink of glasses and dishes being handed out. This group bearing the Ironworks sigil all seemed very familiar with each other—once he was either forgotten or properly ignored, they broke into talks that reminded him of when he and the rest of NOAH reconvened at the Find to share intelligence. Yes, even the almost prickly Nero tol Scaeva had eventually joined them, a mask on his face to conceal his third eye but nevertheless ready to hand out verbal lashings. This felt familiar, except the names that were thrown around were unfamiliar to him… except for one.

Someone cleared their throat, and he looked up at the almost strikingly familiar Roegadyn man. The one with the familiar name. Perhaps this was a case of a name being handed down the generations because there was no way that the Biggs he knew and this Biggs could look as if they were brothers without being somewhat related.

In any case, this Biggs handed him a plate filled with what looked like stew of some sort. Some ingredients were unfamiliar to him, but Seekers were nothing if not eager to eat anything that they could get their claws on. Besides, it smelled delicious. Not that he was all that hungry; he couldn’t quite place whether the smell aggravated his upset stomach or if he was merely on the verge of starvation.

His voice was surprisingly small when he thanked the man—and earned a smile in return. The Roegadyn sat down next to him, his own plate less full than the one he had just handed over.

“Sorry for takin’ you out the tower like that. But we had no way of knowin’ if you woke up the rest would wake up alongside you, and there were a few decidedly _Allagan_ creations in storage there.”

He nodded slowly and stirred his stew a little. “’Tis fine. Startling, perhaps, but in truth I would not know an answer to whether they would rise or not.”

This Biggs snorted, then set his plate aside. “In all likelihood they would have risen, and I would not endanger my comrades and I like this. And ‘fore you wax poetics ‘bout this bein’ the mark of a true leader or whatever, no. Common bloody sense, that’s all that is.”

It was his turn to let out a snort, although it was much more subdued. The longer he looked at his food, the more his stomach could not decide whether he was starved or about to throw up again. Slowly but steadily he forced himself to at least attempt to eat something—it was indeed delicious, but he wasn’t hungry at all. Eventually he settled for putting his plate down as well with a shaky sigh.

“Can I… can I ask you something?”

“I have an idea what you’re going to ask,” the Roegadyn said, voice low. It only confirmed so many fears he had, but still. He had to know. “If you permit me a question of my own, I will gladly answer it.”

He folded his hands together, tail flicking nervously. He hated how his ears and tail gave his emotions away so easily, but such was ever the way of the Miqo’te. They wore their hearts on their sleeves and that precisely was what brought Desch and Salina together all those years ago.

“Very… very well. But… pray tell. The icon emblazoned on your uniforms—you are with the Garlond Ironworks, are you not? Is… I-Is there a way you could… tell me how much… if they….”

Biggs gave him a look that wasn’t pity. Somehow it was a level look, with his lip quivering slightly as he stumbled over his words. Once he caught the other man’s gaze he stopped fumbling about and held his breath.

“Your name. Is it perhaps G’raha Tia?”

G’raha closed his bright red eyes and let out a shaky breath. “It is.”

He heard Biggs lean backwards a little as they sat there, the rest of the Ironworks still quietly talking amongst themselves.

“We are indeed the Garlond Ironworks. Name’s Biggs, third of his name, current chief. As for how much time passed, Master G’raha… two centuries since you closed the doors. Two centuries and a Calamity later.”

For a split moment time seemingly stood still. The word echoed in his skull, hammering away at him. He had expected so many things upon waking up—after all, those who would open the doors would rival ancient Allag in their skill with technology. The doors that would open in what he hoped would be an Astral Era ushered in by his companions from NOAH.

Calamity. Calamity. _Calamity._

Suddenly he understood why the air tasted so different. Why these people took a moment to remember Saint Coinach’s Find.

G’raha was very, very grateful that he had decided not to eat much, for once the fact settled in properly, he jumped to his feet and made certain he had the decency to throw up far enough for the others to not hear his horrible retching between the hysteric laughter that bubbled up somewhere. Calamity. The word sounded so surreal but he did not doubt this stranger. No one right in their mind would joke about a Calamity, especially not when the signs were that clear. The stagnant air. The distinctly rugged look all those technicians had about them. The fact most of them were armed. By the gods, most of them were armed.

Eventually he felt a heavy hand on his back once the horrible retching stopped and the laughter died in his throat. He had likely been making pathetic wheezing sounds for the last few minutes. This Biggs, this perfect stranger from a time well beyond his own, said nothing and merely sat there beside G’raha. There really wasn’t anything that he could have said to make this better.

NOAH, every Student of Baldesion, every single soul he had ever known—dead. They were all dead.

And he was not.


	2. ACT I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tales from the shadows ignored going forward; i didnt expect anything on the 8th calamity aftermath until next years rising lmfao  
reworking the timeline would be. too much of a hassle, ya feel

Logically speaking, he should have expected the death part. He had parted with a smile knowing that he would never see them again, that when he woke again they would all long lie dead and buried and he would be the same just as the day they parted. He had been perfectly mentally prepared for that. It was the Calamity that left his mind reeling.

He had not asked the Ironworks before they went to rest a while—G’raha went against his nature as a diurnal Seeker right now, but truth be told he felt as if he could stay awake for a century after waking up to… this sort of news. Perhaps he even could stay awake that long, though he was not going to strain his body to the limit when it was already not handling the news well. He remained awake, slightly away from the one standing watch and staring into the small campfire. He could ask the watch about the Calamity and what befell the rest of NOAH, of course. But they were all strangers, from Chief Biggs to every single other person. Asking something so deeply personal and selfish felt wrong knowing that they had grown up in an Umbral Era of all things. They might have lived through the Calamity but he had no way of knowing when that took place.

He knew the answer, of course. The way everyone had looked at him with such pity on their faces was the only answer he needed.

These members of the Ironworks likely had not lived through the Calamity itself. The Calamity might have taken place in the same lifetime that he had locked the doors again with Doga and Unei’s parting gift. Which in turn would mean that the Warrior of Light’s exploits and sacrifices and what not had all been in vain. Being a Student of Baldesion he knew the story in broad strokes. Ascians, seeking to usher in a Rejoining between the Source and the Shards; and every Rejoining was accompanied by a horrific catastrophe on the Source that uprooted everything and left thousands of souls dead in its wake. The Scions sought to prevent the balance from tipping too far in Calamity’s favour—Archon Louisoix had tried and failed against a Calamity raging with the dark of night that nearly undid the realm G’raha had come to know in that time. The balance had tipped, and by the time they had managed to gain entry to the Labyrinth of the Ancients the realm had scarcely begun to recover. Umbral Eras lasted longer, though the Seventh Calamity in itself had not been nearly as devastating as the ones in the past.

To think that a barely recovered realm would be shaken by another Calamity not so long thereafter….

G’raha let out a shaky breath. If he thought about this for too long, he would either grind his teeth to dust or throw up again—whichever came first. The Ironworks had not attempted to feed him anything else, though some had muttered something about keeping watch for something or other. Biggs had silenced these whispers quickly, assigned a watch who had only expressed concern for G’raha’s well-being and then ordered the rest to rest. They would need their wits on the morrow, he said, for if G’raha felt up to it they would return to the Crystal Tower to talk in detail about why they had opened the doors.

He didn’t really care about the Crystal Tower looming in the distance like an ominous reminder that this had truly happened. He had half a mind to slink away from the camp and run towards Revenant’s Toll to unveil this sick, sick joke for what his mind thought it was. There was no way Krile would have been content to stay in Sharlayan after everything he had heard happened while he was away. If this was a perverse trick she played on him as a payback for the last time he had gotten her, he was going to admit defeat. This was heinous. Devilish. This sort of thing was not to be joked about.

Part of him knew that the Ironworks weren’t joking.

Part of him desperately wanted these to be people who had joined the crew after he had locked the doors, wanted the Warrior of Light and their friends to pop up and claim that the Garlean Empire had razed the camp and that was that.

But even in this wonderfully clear night with the stars twinkling as the Crystal Tower shone in the distance like a beacon of blue light his restless eyes desperately wanted to see something familiar. A face he knew—not Chief Biggs’ face, however. He so very desperately wanted to wake up to find the other spot in the tent empty and for the person he shared the tent with to stand at the edge of a crystallised cliff with an expression on their face that reminded him so much of himself that it hurt. He wanted to sit down next to someone he knew and talk about Allag as if he hadn’t just woken up from resting inside one of these relics he so desperately hunted for. Wanted to hear voices of people who had died long before the alleged Calamity took them all, wanted to be scolded for sitting on shelves, for forgetting to eat or sleep because he found something that interested him, wanted to have Krile and him get into one of their little wars of heinous pranks on one another to the point that Galuf scolded them both until their ears atrophied.

Eventually he merely hugged his legs to himself and curled up that way. Even his normally twitchy tail was perfectly still and curled around him as he sat there uncertain whether he wanted to cry, laugh, or sleep.

He spent the night like that knowing that he would not awaken from this nightmare yet hoping, foolishly and desperately, that this was but the Crystal Tower playing a trick on him. Surely there were some sorts of side-effects to being caught in eternal slumber that stopped the progression of time within the Crystal Tower. But alas, he never awoke. He heard the night shift switch once, twice, three times—a bad feeling settled in his stomach. It was unusual to swap so many times unless they needed to be very aware of their surroundings. By the time the fourth swap occurred the faint blaze of daybreak was edging over the horizon beyond Silvertear Lake; faint red against the overwhelmingly crystalline glow of the region. That much had not changed. Mor Dhona remained a testament to the Calamity that had razed the realm with flames of darkness; the land had bled crystal and jutting out from that crystalline land was the Crystal Tower itself. A vague remnant of another Calamity, a reminder that even the greatest of nations were fated to perish in the pursuit of power if one listened blindly to those that promised it.

Someone cleared their throat next to him, and he blearily unfurled from his position. The night watchers had thought he had been asleep, but all G’raha had managed in the end was dozing a little for a bell or two; his mind had been too busy making up horrific scenarios of his friends and colleagues dying to whatever Calamity this had been. If the pattern held true then this would have so tragically and ironically been a Calamity powered by light.

The person who now sat down next to him was Chief Biggs once again, whose eyes gleamed in the faint morning light. Hells, he could not have been up for long yet he somehow managed to look just about ready to sprint to the Crystal Tower if the need arose. It spoke volumes about his upbringing or current situation, and G’raha liked neither of these possibilities. Especially with the night watch being as it was, it was likely that the world was still in disarray.

“Good morning,” he eventually mumbled, still hugging his legs to himself but twitching his tail slightly to show that he was awake and aware—but by the gods, his voice was raw and quiet. He almost immediately regretted speaking.

Chief Biggs nodded. “I reckon we should be the one wishin’ you a good morning—were it a good morning for you. The other said you might’ve slept, but I know a guy who’s been kept awake all night by something gnawing at his mind better than anyone. If you need rest, please. Let us—“

“Rest? ‘Tis about the last thing I need after all that time I—after _two centuries_ of rest, I would sooner tear the Crystal Tower down than go back to sleep.” His voice was still so very, very raw, but even he heard the strange emotion which laced the hoarse whisper. He flattened his ears against his head and finally uncurled properly. His limbs were so very, very stiff. It almost hurt to move after being still for so long.

“Point taken, Master G’raha. Still, we would rather not drag you back to the Crystal Tower if you have no desire to return there.”

G’raha shook his head and tried to get up. Chief Biggs nearly immediately offered him a hand, which he gratefully took. Once he stood he felt a little better—not that he felt good to begin with. He was likely as pale as death itself. What he did instead of brushing his bangs out of his face and to neaten that mess up a little was reaching for his braid and undoing it with surprisingly deft if shaky fingers and then immediately retied it into a loose ponytail.

“No. You said that you wanted to tell me why you needed me awake there, and I would like to hear that. If I change my mind I will let you know and instead show you around the tower.”

The man looked rather surprised for a moment, then smiled. “Very well. We shall depart once everyone is awake.” For a moment he was quiet, then he scratched his chin. “Oh, and… Master G’raha?”

He looked over slightly, ears perked up to signal he was paying attention to the man.

“Judgin’ from reports from that time, you used to be a good shot with a bow.”

He had a feeling he knew where this was going. “Nothing compared to the Warrior of Light, but yes.”

There was the slightest of shifts in Chief Biggs’ posture when G’raha mentioned the Warrior of Light. Perhaps that was something that he would have to investigate later—that reaction did not exactly seem normal. But he did not know these people. He didn’t even know if the Warrior of Light had recently died or had been dead for centuries. Perhaps there were even new ones around, sharing the same title that so many others had shared in the past—but none were the very person he was thinking of.

Chief Biggs cleared his throat after a moment of silence. “A’ight. Afraid we don’t have any bows with us, and definitely didn’t find anythin’ like that in the tower while we looked around. But we kinda need you to be ready to fend off somethin’ or someone.”

He blinked a few times. “If this is about the creatures held in stasis in the tower, removing me from there should not have released the locks. In fact, I made certain that the locks would not release unless my express orders were given, so as long as you have not broken any containers—“

“Master G’raha, and though it pains me to be the one to tell you this—this is an Umbral Era. Mor Dhona’s not the place you knew once. I’ll wake Kara and have her issue you a spare weapon in a moment.”

With that the Roegadyn left, and G’raha staggered to the side a little.

* * *

The gunblade he carried on the way back to the Crystal Tower was most definitely a strange contraption. He had only ever seen weapons like these in the hands of Garlean centurions and other higher-ranked ones; the most infamous of these weapons being Gaius van Baelsar’s Heirsbane. This had looked like a weapon of similar making at first, but the very moment he looked at it he could see that it was not made for Garlean hands. Once the Ironworks woman, a Highlander called Kara, explained how to handle it he understood what it was supposed to be.

He had at first denied any sort of skill with aether manipulation and cited the fact that he was an Ilsabardian Seeker—she had merely rolled her eyes and said that if he truly lacked the skill he could still swing the damned thing around. He had… not felt this transparent since Rammbroes called him out on how scared he truly was before he departed for the World of Darkness by the Warrior of Light’s side. He wasn’t Garlean—he was very well able to manipulate aether. Hells, back in Sharlayan Krile had spent some time teaching him an assortment of easy spells from all three schools of magic; he wouldn’t be calling down the very heavens themselves to set a battlefield ablaze like so many talented thaumaturges could but he was handy enough to do some quick battlefield healing or to throw someone off-balance by unexpectedly sending forth a ball of ice.

At the very least the weapon was light. It looked well-maintained and all things considered it made sense that the Ironworks carried something like that around. Chief Biggs lugged a gun of some sort around along with what looked like an aether convertor of some sort, another man carried a ton of throwing knives along with a larger, curved one. Hells, even the staves the three mages in the group carried had a blade of some sort embedded. It made his blood run cold—the Ironworks he knew had all been armed more or less but not this… excessively.

The next thing he noticed was that the crystallised ground here in Mor Dhona had lost quite a lot of its lustre. It used to gleam bright icy blue with the Crystal Tower in the distance being a deeper, more terrifying blue. And in the distance the corrupted crystal shone bright red like a fire that would have never died.

It was almost perfectly white now, bleached by aetherial imbalance. He turned around to look at the Burning Shards in the distance—and immediately whirled back around with his ears flattened to his head and his heart beating to loudly he thought one of these strangers would hear as it shattered his ribs with sound alone. The ominous glint of red was completely gone, replaced by white in white. Mor Dhona truly was not the place that he once knew, but still the Crystal Tower stood tall and shining as blue as it always had been.

Halfway to the damned place the group suddenly stopped when Chief Biggs raised a hand. G’raha hadn’t even seen the man make that movement but everyone else had. Clearly these people had worked together for a long, long time. Gods, he truly was a fish out of water—but thinking about fish out of water merely brought up a memory from what now was ages ago, laughing as Biggs and Wedge sat beside him and the Warrior of Light, all four of them armed with fishing rods at Rammbroes’ command. While Cid was busy calculating things they were supposed to catch dinner.

He banished that memory as fast as it bubbled up; he did not have time to lament the deaths of these three. There would be time later—whenever later was.

An unnervingly familiar scrape of claws against crystal tore him from his thoughts, but long before he even had a chance to locate where the damned hippogryph was, the Ironworks had moved. A loud gunshot rang through the air and all hell broke loose.

Those weren’t the hippogryphs he was used to. Those things had stalked near the Burning Shards, had barely gone up to his hips and while vicious when threatened generally tended to hunt their prey far away from Spoken eyes unless they were scavenging for garbage near the settlement. The ones attacking now with hideous snarls were much larger than that. Their wild eyes were completely blank, their claws bent and sharper than he remembered them being. He knew that he was displaying the terror that went through him in plain sight—one of the many things he did not quite like about being a Miqo’te; a tail and the ears so very clearly displayed what was going on in his head. He narrowly dodged one of these creatures tossed into his general direction after taking a shot point blank from Chief Biggs and rather than think about the crystal growing on half its body he swung the gunblade. It met crystal, it crunched horribly, but G’raha kept hacking away at the thing. This… this creature. He didn’t have a proper name for it. It writhed and snapped at his legs, its teeth effortlessly tore through the leather but G’raha didn’t feel a thing. He knew he was bleeding but something had come unhinged—he instead started swinging the blade as if he had never done anything else in his life.

He had no idea when it ended, but when it did he immediately dropped to the ground and tore the boot off. One of of the staff-swinging Ironworks employees immediately dropped down next to him, his eyes wide as saucers as they looked at the wound. G’raha did not hear a thing the Keeper said as he slowly removed a satchel from his belt, likely to disinfect the wound before finally closing it up a little with a spell.

It only brought up more unwelcome memories, of fending off creatures in the Labyrinth of the Ancients after a first purge led by the Warrior of Light, of said Warrior of Light also handing him a vial of some sort of potion to disinfect a burn on his arm. He knew he was shaking when Chief Biggs offered him a hand—G’raha hadn’t even noticed that someone had put the boot back on. Judging from the sting that went through his leg it was merely patched up, and in the distance he heard the Keeper talk about the bandages needing to be changed every other day but he would be taking care of that—all while a Lalafellin lass grumbled something about their resources running too low to pamper him; as long as it didn’t get infected it would be fine.

G’raha shook his head at that. “I… I can take care of that myself. Once we… uhm. Once we reach the tower.”

It was a well-taught fact in Sharlayan that mages were not to use more aether than strictly necessary. The War of the Magi had taught the people of Hydaelyn that much, and the very few Black and White Mages were all controlled and supervised. The fact that a conjurer was using salves instead of simply mending it—and there was no denying the Miqo’te was a skilled conjurer—painted a picture of how the aetheric balance was affected even years after the Calamity.

He limped in the middle of the group with a heavy scowl. Chief Biggs took a few potshots at some creatures that might have merely been in hiding after the sound of a fight, but it was clear the Ironworks were on edge now. Too on edge for something like predators; those mutated hippogryphs had been a handful but they had been swiftly dealt with. But there was someone clearly on the lookout for something, Chief Biggs’ shoulders were tense, and slowly but steadily he started to realise what precisely was going on when he dragged himself up the stairs that led to the doors he had closed so many years ago. They weren’t looking for monsters.

They were looking for people.

People they hadn’t come across, but it made his tail puff up a little. It felt so wrong to even think about that. There had certainly been pillagers and the like back then, but Mor Dhona had been a stronghold of adventurers, not to mention the Scions that were not out on a mission as well as the House of Splendors. Only fools would have attempted to start something in a place like that and it extended to the rest of the region.

Knowing that he was in a Mor Dhona where people were scared of being attacked by monsters and other people alike left his mind reeling as he put a hand against the doors.

The Ironworks had actually closed it after they dragged him out of there. That… he hadn’t expected after hearing how they had had to ‘give it a good smack’. Only then did he feel all those eyes upon him, and G’raha took a deep breath. It was better not to think. There was no point in thinking because they were going to answer his questions. They had to answer his questions. There was nothing else they could do and nothing else he could do.

He wasn’t exactly Doga and Unei—there was little to no dramatic flair in how he opened the doors this time. What the Ironworks didn’t hear was him whispering an almost heartfelt plea to open the doors to reveal something that he knew, something that had not changed since he woke.

And indeed, the doors gave way to the same shining blue that had made his heart beat faster all those years ago, the same shining blue that had swallowed him whole as he closed these doors. But even though it was familiar all that he felt now as he looked into his domain was uncertain dread. By the Twelve, he could swear he heard the laughter and excited chatter of the adventurers that joined the Warrior of Light and the members of the Sons of Saint Coinach that he joined, the marvelling oohs and aahs from the Ironworks employees that joined as the last part of their ridiculously huge party.

He bit down on his lower lip to keep himself from screaming, then breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly.

Then he turned back around to the Ironworks.

“The… the Ocular. Where, uhm, where the Chief found me. It might be best if we talk there.”

Once they all stepped inside and he closed the doors once more a familiar aetherial thrum filled his ears and finally calmed his racing heart. As he led them up the crystal stairs up into where the upper spire met the rest of the building the Crystal Tower all but synched up with him once more. He could shut it down and force everything and everyone into a deep sleep. Perhaps they would awaken in an Astral Era where the horrors of this Umbral Era did not make them walk through Mor Dhona as if it were full of enemies and dangerous creatures. But no, he couldn’t. He shouldn’t.

Instead he focused on what was truly important—the tower itself.

It seemed as if everything was still in the same place as it had been ages ago. No containment pods had broken open to let loose any Allagan monstrosities housed in the lower part of the tower. Despite the devastation outside everything in here seemed just fine, and with a dry mouth G’raha opened the door to the Ocular. He did not dare entering the control room once again because he was fairly certain he would completely shut everything down if left to his own devices.

And he was on his own. He was the only person who could control this tower.

Thus instead of asking them to stop he dropped himself to the ground and all but tore off the shoe. Tore off the bandages and quietly started focusing on what Krile had taught him. The Crystal Tower ran on light alone and converted it into the other elements; kind of like photosynthesis except it was perfected to such a degree that no one could replicate it. The crystal shone blue because it was multiaspected; the Burning Shards were the multiaspected corrupted counterpart to that serene blue. Except those were gone now. The tower meanwhile thrived on light, the same light that seemingly drowned everything around them out. It was strange, he thought as he heard surprised, even shocked whispers while he closed the wound. Those people were strange, yes, but he was just as strange to them as they were to him. And perhaps strangest of all was the Crystal Tower.

“Please, sit down,” he said quietly and then looked at the Ironworks. “I do apologise for my humble abode’s lack of proper chairs and the like, but I did not quite expect company any time soon.”

It were Chief Biggs and the woman Kara who had given him the weapon on the ground next to him who sat down first; the rest hesitated a moment longer but also sat down eventually.

G’raha closed his eyes. “I commend your skill, seeing as you managed to open these doors. Given that you’re the Garlond Ironworks you likely know my story, the story of that tower, so let us dispense with the pleasantries henceforth. You said that you would be answering my questions and tell me why it was that you roused this tower from its slumber, did you not?”

Chief Biggs nodded.

“If you don’t mind me asking right off the bat—what year is it?” Chief Biggs had only said something about two centuries. He needed to know the proper date.

“Year 213 of the Eighth Umbral Era, Master G’raha,” the Keeper conjurer said. “And as you are likely wondering—the Eighth Calamity took place in Year 14 of the Seventh Astral Era.”

“Year… 14,” he repeated, his ears going down a little. That wasn’t much time that the world had spent in peace. Hells, that was 12 years after he closed the doors for good. Once more he noticed the almost pitying looks the members of the Ironworks shot him. It took him a moment to file that away for later, then he shook his head slightly. He knew it was pointless to ask about them. “How did you figure out to open the doors?”

A moment passed in silence before an Auri woman shook her head slightly. “Lots of research. About a century ago Chief R’mjohl requested access to a cache of Allagan machinery and the like, but it took us until recently to figure out the last piece of the puzzle—we had to trick the doors into thinking we had royal blood. It took a fair amount of trial and error and at the end the damned thing tried to keep us out still despite it lighting up the same as it did for you just now, but we got in anyway. The rest of the mechanism works just like most other Allagan stuff, but the blood part… yeah, that was tricky.”

The entire group looked proud of themselves, and G’raha felt a surge of pride himself. Despite what he had seen of this world so far, those were the people who had managed to do what not even Cid Garlond had managed in his lifetime.

There were… so many things he could have asked. Should have asked. But he already knew that all he would get from that would be heartbreak; a Calamity never passed without casualties. And this time around rather than a record of history as it was to these people, he knew a lot of the ones who had likely perished in the Calamity rather well. He didn’t want to think about the Sons of Saint Coinach dying, didn’t want to think of the Garlond Ironworks along with its founder likely surviving against all odds and scrambling to make up theories on how to make the world a better place. He didn’t want to think of the Scions, didn’t want to think of the Warrior of Light and Krile—because there was no way that Krile would have stayed in Sharlayan after what had happened to the Isle of Bal. No way in all seven hells would she remain trapped somewhere when everything she knew lay sunken beneath the sea. She wasn’t that sort of person.

But G’raha Tia was nothing if not a foolish creature. He very much wanted to know what happened to those he knew directly and those he knew by proxy.

He didn’t care asking right now. Not when it all was so raw and fresh on his mind.

Instead, once again, he turned his attention to the more important matters.

“Why… why did you go through all that trouble, then? What is it that you need the Crystal Tower for?”

Chief Biggs crossed his arms. The rest of his crew also looked rather sombre all of a sudden, and G’raha felt the atmosphere in the Ocular come to absolute zero. He was scared. They were scared as well, judging from the careful glances some of them shot him.

“That will require a while to explain. You kinda locked the doors long before anythin’ relevant to this tale happened.”

He thwapped his tail on the crystal floor and turned his ears towards Chief Biggs. He was aware that the red eyes were likely rather startling to look at, which is why he avoided direct eye contact.

“It is not as if anything or anyone can attack us here within these walls—please, tell me. Tell me what is relevant to this tale, and tell me why you roused me.”


	3. ACT I

As if they had expected him to ask that, one of the people present handed him a rough timeline. He’d worked with these before, although he had always expected these to be used in Sharlayan only. They had likely understood his raised eyebrows, because Chief Biggs snorted a little and said that the Sharlayan G’raha likely still knew did no longer exist and those who survived had gone back to New Sharlayan and settled in Idyllshire. That had earned a confused look from him—a Viera smacked Chief Biggs’ arm and angrily said that according to the timeline G’raha had removed himself from the pages of history before Idyllshire’s name first popped up. Then she rolled her eyes and explained quickly; a settlement in the ruins of New Sharlayan built by adventurers and Goblins alike turned the last bastion of mankind where chaos did not reign supreme. It piqued his interest quite a lot; the Warrior of Light had mentioned there were small groups of beastmen that were not tempered and quite actively hated their tempered counterparts for the most part. They had worked tirelessly to forge relations with these groups and succeeded in the most part.

They had also said that once the expedition into the Crystal Tower was over and things calmed down a little they would have loved to introduce him to these groups—they never got to do that.

But hearing this Viera mention that now, two hundred years after a Calamity, there were plenty of beastmen still around and living hand in hand with the Spoken would have sounded so… idyllic, were it not for the fact that it had taken the world almost being annihilated for them to get to this point.

He focused his attention on the timeline once again. Quite a lot happened immediately after NOAH finished their exploration of the Crystal Tower, and he noted with a frown on his face that he most definitely did not help the matter the slightest. This entire thing read like an epic of a hero from a fairy tale from ancient Allag—the hero who ended a seemingly endless war, the hero who sparked the flames of revolution, the hero who survived the apocalypse, only to be betrayed by his fellow man. He had nearly bitten his lower lip bloody by the time he reached the point on that timeline when Krile passed away, and he put the thing aside.

“Depressin’, ain’t it?”

He said nothing. There was nothing to _be_ said, really. His friends and colleagues, all dead in that horrid catastrophe or suffering the long-lasting effects of it and wasting away. Hells, for the first time in years he thought of his birth tribe. He had barely spared a thought to the rest of the tribe, but with Ilsabard being one of the first places to fall into complete disarray there was no way that his tribe had survived any of this.

“After you went to place the tower in a deep slumber, Eorzea and the rest of Hydaelyn certainly made no point in stoppin’. The wheels kept turnin’ all thanks to Emet-Selch in the heart of the Garlean Empire—by the time the young Master Leveilleur and van Baelsar struck him down at the cost of their lives it was too late. Much too late.”

G’raha nodded slowly.

“But this ain’t where the story ends. At least that’s what Chief Garlond believed and he pulled no stops at makin’ certain that the theories were sound by the time he died.”

He narrowed his eyes a little and looked at the timeline again. It seemed as if Cid had spent the better part of his years after the Calamity researching something that involved… Alexander and Omega. Omega he had heard of before; yet another Allagan creation of some sort if he remembered correctly, one that rested well under Carteneau. Or had rested there, until the Seventh Calamity had unearthed part of the darned thing. Much like Ultima the Eorzean Alliance had feared that rousing Omega would lead to something similar—but apparently at some point they had been forced to use the thing to get rid of a Primal.

“Omega and Alexander, correct?”

“Considerin’ the time you locked the doors, you probably know what Omega is.”

“Yes, more or less,” G’raha turned his ears down a little and stopped moving his tail around. “Alexander, however, might require some explanation.”

Chief Biggs opened his mouth, but the Keeper conjurer rolled his eyes and started talking instead.

“Plainly put, a machine infused with the power of a Primal thanks to the Goblin faction that called itself the Illuminati. A Primal that controlled time rather than any other element—alas, much like any Primal it had a semblance of sentience. Time is a fickle beast, and somehow that adventure wrapped around in a stable time loop. The machine’s still in the Hinterlands, as inaccessible as it has been since the day the loop closed.”

An inaccessible tower, an inaccessible Primal and an inaccessible machine—G’raha was starting to see a connection, but that did not explain what was going on here the slightest.

The Ocular remained awkwardly quiet, the silence only interrupted by Kara hissing “Khasil’a, don’t talk over the Chief” and the Keeper grumbling an apology.

Eventually Chief Biggs got up with the rest of the Ironworks following suit. He offered G’raha a hand—G’raha only looked up in confusion.

“The Rift and time. That’s what these machines either controlled or had a method of traversin’. Chief Garlond’s theory says we ought to be able to prevent the Calamity if we use that correctly; ‘cause on the Source we can’t do a thing. But the First….”

G’raha took the offered hand. Chief Biggs hauled him up.

“’Tis a lot to swallow, even for royalty locked in a tower till time itself ends or someone awakens them. But maybe we should let you wake up properly and see the state of Hydaelyn for yourself, Master G’raha.”

He drew his ears back; just thinking about it upset his stomach again. The last thing he wanted was to throw up on the floor of the Crystal Tower—he was fairly certain that while the throne room had been scrubbed clean to prevent any engineers or scientists from getting nervous there were still places within the spire even that had by now centuries old blood splatters on the ground. He did not want to add to the mess the slightest, but the prospect of leaving the Crystal Tower behind for an Eorzea he barely knew was terrifying. Even more since he understood what Cid might have suggested.

The Ironworks were given the missive to rouse the tower and its keeper so that they might use it the same way that Xande had used it and invoked the Calamity all those centuries ago—as something to siphon power. Enough power to hurl them across the Rift, through time itself so that they might prevent the Calamity.

“Aye… perhaps that would be the best course of action.”

A mumble went through the group as he stood there and stared at his feet—someone said something about a tour through Eorzea being suicidal at best and a madman’s quest at worst what with all the murderers running about the countryside. It made his stomach drop; back when the Warrior of Light had conquered this tower it had been Imperials, yes, but the fact that no one mentioned any sort of war only made this thought worse. They were scared of people. Their fellow people.

Thus, G’raha looked up after a moment and grimaced. “Though I would think that perhaps… perhaps getting back to, ah, Idyllshire you called it? Wherever your base of operations is—I would quite like getting there first to sort my thoughts.”

A joke about the Sharlayan craving the Sharlayan settlement fell flat as he started to lead the people out. He only stopped halfway down the staircase leading to the ground floor to open the doors with a swift hand movement, which in turn made Chef Biggs stop.

“If I may, Master G’raha… the reports said that you put the tower into slumber and yourself alongside it, but I would have thought that a feat like that could only be done from the throne atop the tower itself.”

“I… I did think the same.” He closed his eyes and crossed his arms defensively. He could very clearly remember his fellow members o NOAH’s faces as he turned around and stole a last glance at the Warrior of Light. “As it turned out, I could have done so right on the doorstep had I only known how to reach out properly. I assume I lay on the floor when you found me? I did not expect it to respond so well to my query, is all. It took me by surprise and put me out of commission along with itself when I politely asked in the control room.” He let out a small laugh that he knew sounded more sad than anything else. “Emperor Xande made for an impressive figure on that throne. Me, I would have looked quite silly sleeping on there like a lost kitten.”

Doga and Unei together would have looked much better sitting on the throne that their originals never got to take. But he swatted that thought away and closed the doors without turning around when he left the tower last.

* * *

Revenant’s Toll itself was barely more than a half-heartedly put together ruin. He dimly recalled hundreds of adventurers and merchants being there every time he marched here to get some supplies for the Sons of Saint Coinach with the Warrior of Light. Hundreds of people, and most of them had greeted the hero of the realm. Now there were clearly some settlers still here but all of them were hiding. G’raha felt eyes on him as he followed the Ironworks—and he realised that he kind of stood out. The Ironworks uniform looked mostly the same despite the duller colours but all of them wore travelling cloaks of a kind. Between all the brown capes and what not he stood out like a sore thumb with his red hair, red eyes, red clothes. Hells, he felt vaguely underdressed for the weather as it was. He started shivering when they stopped for a moment to explain where the airship was. Somewhere in Coerthas, not too far from the Aurum Vale. They would have to settle for the night somewhere or march the entire night—and it all hinged upon how well he felt. It was clear that despite the fact that they were engineers and what not, they were all used to marching about. Likely because travel by airship was no longer as common as it had been back then; G’raha did not want to consider travelling by aetherite in these conditions. Besides, he was fairly certain that every aetherite he had ever passingly entertained the thought of attuning to had been smashed by now or been ruined by not being tended to for years. The one in Revenant’s Toll had most definitely been smashed and by now not even pieces of it remained—only the broken base of the aetherite remained as a warning, perhaps. A warning that nothing was safe. Or perhaps he was reading too much into wanton destruction. 

Or he was going insane with… grief, loneliness, whatever madness that taken Xande.

Yes, that madness must have been in his bloodline, he thought with a smile on his face. After all, whether it was truly blood given or merely a bastard child that imbued his bloodline with Allagan blood, it ran in his veins. It made him a descendant of Salina, who was a relative of Xande—there was a fair chance that G’raha had a natural disposition for going mad when it came to mortality. And by the gods was he bloody aware of how fragile Spoken life was by this point as the rocky path they followed grew colder and colder, and by the time the first snowflakes started falling this high up he was about to start laughing like a madman.

Was this what Krile had called a stage of grief back when he had received a letter that stated his father was dead? He barely remembered—and Krile wasn’t alive any longer. Whatever linkshell communications they had had ceased after the island went down and by the time that Krile had replaced it and was on her way to Eorzea he had been slumbering for quite a while. Even if he wanted to ask if that was something she said to him when they were younger he could no longer ask her. Not via linkshell. Not in person. She was dead. Dead and buried and he didn’t even know _where._ He didn’t know where anyone was buried. 

He wasn’t quite sure if he was shaking from the cold or from the utter horror that seeped through his body by now. But he blankly watched the snow fall as he numbly walked alongside the Ironworks; barely saw a thing when he started slowing down as his entire body started going number and number. He barely even registered that the people ahead of him stopped, that Chief Biggs all but jogged back down and G’raha most certainly barely registered that the man took his coat off and flung it around him.

Chief Biggs was saying something but all G’raha heard was static, most definitely not unlike back when he started remembering things. But rather than tales of ancient Allag passed down through his bloodline he very desperately wished he could hear everyone’s voices one last time. It would be enough for him to let go and help these people, but the biting cold made it hard to focus on anything but the static.

The one thing he registered was that his legs gave in and that Chief Biggs nearly fell himself as he tried to keep G’raha from falling off the ledge they were on.

A tumble into the abyss sounded quite pleasant—and that was the last thing he thought.

* * *

He did not wake up to the stale evening breeze, he did most definitely not wake up to someone sounding an alarm, or the Warrior of Light jerking up from a nightmare likely induced by trauma. No, G’raha woke to the rumble of an engine. Smoother than the engines he remembered, and it took him a long moment before his brain recalled that it was smoother because the technology had improved. 

He sat up and rubbed at his eyes—he felt awful. His sight was swimming and something in the back of his his head sounded decidedly like horrible whispering. 

Going mad, was he?

In any case, he looked around where he was and slowly but steadily took in the place. It was most definitely a cabin on an airship, albeit one that wasn’t meant for passengers to rest in. It more looked like a storage chamber—a storage chamber that had been filled to the brim with books and notes, with a map plastered slightly askew on the walls. A study, then. A place that even people from the future knew a Sharlayan would feel comfortable in. And he very dearly wished he could be comfortable. Instead all he felt was dread at being left alone, with that hissing noise that sounded somewhat like whispering.

No, he was definitely going mad.

But unlike Xande he had the chance to surround himself with decidedly less insane people. Thus he jumped off the makeshift bed he had been placed on and slowly walked over to the door. A few glances around the room told him nothing—he did not recognise he handwriting on most of these notes, which meant it was most likely Chief Biggs’ handwriting. There were a few rather faded notes and what not but G’raha did not dare investigate these. He was fairly certain that he could curl up and hope to die if he saw anyone’s handwriting that he remembered. 

The door wasn’t locked and he slipped through as quietly and quickly as possible—the rest of the airship he was on was a fairly standard design. There were a few oddities here and there as he slowly started climbing the stairs; the way the wood was carved most definitely did not resemble any carpentry style he had seen used for airships in the past. He leaned against the door that led to the top deck, one ear flicking against the wood to check if anyone out there was speaking. The last thing he wanted to do was interrupt yet another conversation.

Nothing.

He opened the door very hesitantly, almost willing to scold himself for it—but he was the fish out of temporal water, the keeper of the Crystal Tower rather than the ridiculously bold and unconstrained Student of Baldesion who had played his game with the Warrior of Light. Even if he wanted to act as he had had in the past there was no point to it. He hadn’t felt that cocky confidence since the very day Doga and Unei appeared near the Crystal Tower to open the doors, and he most certainly was not feeling it right now. He hadn’t even considered himself still capable of being so freaked out by everything—but the fact that no one stood on deck made him consider slinking back in and hiding between some crates until someone came looking for him.

But no. If he was going utterly mad, he might as well do it while looking at the world below. His steps were uncertain as he approached the rails that separated him from the yawning empty air between the airship and the cold, hard ground.

He drew his ears back with a hiss one he realised where they were. The dim afternoon light had made it hard to see at first but below them was a forest. Or what remained of a forest.

They were flying high enough that nothing outside of Garlean artillery would hit them from the ground. And the ground was mostly dead, horribly cracked remnants of what once had been large trees that likely made the ground impossible to see from above. G’raha turned his head to look in another direction; but everywhere he looked there were no trees left standing. The ground from up here looked dry, cracked, as if someone had sucked all the aether out of it. The air was positively vile and he retched a little before grabbing onto the coat that Chief Biggs had tossed over his shoulders and using it to cover his mouth and nose. It didn’t really help—now that he was focused on it he could not ignore the still, choking air that was drained of aether.

It wasn’t until the airship swerved a little and he saw the rest of the region that he realised where exactly they were. The mountains were unchanged, as mountains were like to be, but looking at them for too long made him realise that something was most definitely off. But in the distance he knew a hive was supposed to be—the Dravanian Forelands were home to the Vath after all. Even a Sharlayan student like G’raha had learned that; he hadn’t exactly passed through the Forelands but he knew they were there.

The hives no longer stood.

Much like the Chocobo Forest had withered and the trees turned into naught but dead fossilised stumps and broken pieces of wood, the Vath hives had crumbled and broken, toppled over and fallen. He clutched the rail hard enough that his hand started to hurt, while the one he used to hold the cloth to his face cramped up. He was in the Dravanian Forelands, and nothing of the place he had heard so much about remained. The ruins of Anyx Trine were not precisely ruins any longer; they looked as if someone had attempted to rebuild them and then abandoned the course before finishing it. There were no dragon hatchlings testing out their wings near the tower there—not a single living being seemed to be around safe for the Ironworks and their airship high up in the sky. No beastmen. No Chocobos. No dragons.

Nothing.

He flinched when he heard the door open.

Part of him expected Chief Biggs, but as he swerved around to look at the person on the deck with him now, he saw that it was the conjurer again. The man looked at him for a moment before G’raha nodded—it wasn’t that uncommon a practice for travelling conjurers to hesitate approaching someone under their care until the patient acknowledged them somehow.

The Keeper didn’t seem shy the slightest; once the acknowledgement was there he all but confidently strode over and brusquely grabbed G’raha by the shoulders to get him away from the rails. It earned the man a confused hiss from the Sharlayan, and G’raha thrashed his tail angrily when the conjurer finally let go of his shoulders.

“Hmm.” A cold, judging stare—G’raha shrunk away from the conjurer a little. “Just the fact that you seemingly lack the boldness of Tias your age is concerning. Anyone else would have given me a good beating.” And with that, the coldness vanished from his face as he offered G’raha a hand. “Name’s Khasil’a. Apologies, Master G’raha, you woke just as I went to get something to eat from my comrades. With your state being what it was, I feared you not in complete control of your mental facilities.”

He grinned—G’raha noticed that his fangs were not as long as a proper Keeper’s were supposed to be.

“… Would you… would you rather I shear the grin off your face, or…?”

“Nay, Heavens forfend! But most Seekers your approximate age are… bolder when approached by someone younger and allegedly weaker than them, let alone would they tolerate being shoved around.”

There was a time that G’raha would have shoved back. But much like most other things, he had buried it deep within his heart knowing that everyone he had ever known lay dead and buried now. Khasil’a was not Rammbroes putting a hand on his head to remove him from the Warrior of Light while they had a spat that he barely remembered.

G’raha shook his head. “If you are as well-versed in the history of the Crystal Tower as your Chief is, you ought to know that I most certainly did not enjoy a regular Seeker upbringing. Had I shoved people in Sharlayan around I would have gotten strung up or perhaps lectured to until my ears bled.”

The conjurer narrowed his eyes a little at that—something about his pupils was off. He clearly had a Seeker and a Keeper for parents, and judging by the name he bore his mother was a Keeper. Not that unusual in Sharlayan but it had been an oddity in Eorzea and Ilsabard both. Still, Khasil’a seemed to ponder on what G’raha had said for a moment, then nodded.

“Aye, now that you mention it… Still, your state is more than a little concerning, Master G’raha. The travelling cloaks we wore were not for warmth; the part of Coerthas we passed through before boarding the ship was barely worth the mention. Still, you collapsed into a shivering, whimpering heap—we may have forgotten that your mental state does not quite mix well with the aetheric discrepancy thanks to Black Rose. A fatal error on our part; some people did report feeling slightly nauseous while searching the Crystal Tower. I of all people should have made the immediate connection between your state and aether sickness of some sort.”

G’raha blinked—then walked back to the rail and looked down. They had passed most of the Forelands by now and were clearly en route to the Hinterlands. Mountains that were covered in pale, sickly-looking grass now filled his vision rather than the pathetic remnants of the Chocobo Forest and Avalonia Fallen. It looked about as pathetic as he still felt and he let out a long, weary sigh.

Khasil’a walked up to stand beside him, his ears alert and his tail perfectly still. He must have seen this landscape a hundred times—it took G’raha a moment to realise that Khasil’a was not looking down at all. His grey eyes were narrowed and focused on the other Miqo’te, his arms crossed and the alertness clearly trained in the art of healing. Hells, G’raha had seen healers like that following the Warrior of Light around, all alert and ready to check even the slightest stumble out.

“Have you been coughing or vomiting blood?”

That seemed… crass. G’raha flattened his ears against his head. “Wha?”

“Hm. I see.” With that, the alertness dropped nearly immediately. Hells, now Khasil’a looked like a Miqo’te barely old enough to be considered an adult, in an Ironworks uniform that looked comically huge on his small frame. “If you start feeling anything strange—bouts of dizziness, loss of sight or hearing, hissing noises, buzzing, symptoms like a sudden fever, coughing until your throat is so raw you can barely speak—please. Find me or my mother in Idyllshire. She’s the head of the infirmary, just ask for Khasil or Khasil’a and people will know where to direct you.”

G’raha crossed his arms and leaned forwards to rest his arms against the rail. Below them the mountains gave way to the main part of the Hinterlands, where New Sharlayan lay abandoned and where the people of Idyllshire had apparently built their city amidst the ruins two centuries ago. He had never been to the Hinterlands, he had considered getting there once the business with the Crystal Tower was settled. Perhaps beside the Warrior of Light if they wanted for a companion in the wilderness. He had doubted it then, he doubted it now. But he had entertained the question hundreds of times—if a Student of Baldesion was permitted to join the Scions perhaps not as a member but as an ally. In the end he had never managed to work up the nerves—the only three proper requests he ever made to the Warrior of Light were simple and nerve-wracking in their own way.

_Let me come with you to the World of Darkness._

_Please leave me alone to think... worry not, I shall join you anon._

_The doors will be closing soon—please, turn around._

“An odd bunch of symptoms,” he sighed once he batted that thought away. “Is there a name to go with them?”

Khasil’a shuffled a little, likely awkwardly adjusting his collar. G’raha did not turn around to look at his expression, but it wasn’t that hard to imagine the face he wore right now.

“Delayed Reaction. But you seem… fine. Other than than the aether sickness, which would explain your overall lethargy on top of… everything else going through your head. Can’t help you with the head, but the aether sickness will fix itself in the next few days or we can try getting you used to the atmosphere in a different way. I’m sure my mother would be most thrilled to help you with that.”

He looked at the Dravanian Hinterlands once more. Surely this place would have been more impressive in the past, perhaps some of these ruins would have been less collapsed and overgrown than they were now. In the midst of the river stood Alexander, an impenetrable shield keeping the Ironworks and everything else out while also containing the Primal within. And somewhere up ahead, G’raha spied a settlement. It might have started small but it had expanded, taken over some parts of the abandoned buildings and rebuilt the roads. The change was sudden, abrupt—and the airship slowly started to descend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not dead. very much alive. focus-forced all classes except for a few crafters on my main. got hideously depressed and dropped out of static due to no progress wearing away at my brain. wound up too mentally exhausted to write. felt it was pretty pointless and nothing told me otherwise (until i got my head out of the gutter by. not doing savage anymore)
> 
> hopefully better now


	4. ACT I

Khasil Zhwan, mistress of the infirmary in Idyllshire, proved to be… not quite what he had expected hearing about her on the airship. The very moment Chief Biggs, Khasil’a and another Ironworks employee entered the room she narrowed her eyes at all three of them—and then her eyes went wide as saucers for a moment when she saw G’raha all but being useless weight against her son. The surprise subsided, and G’raha half expected a nasty tongue-lashing for the sorry state he was in.

What he did not expect was the tall, lean and truthfully just as slim as her son Keeper to all but stomp over to Chief Biggs and sock him in the gut. Apparently with enough force that the Roegadyn keeled over with a pained huff.

“One would think you ‘n yous smart brainsters would know how to take care o’ people, but you sure never do!” The other Ironworks employee backed off immediately and all but fled the infirmary when Khasil walked over and Khasil’a gently nudged G’raha forward a little. “Look at _you,_ poor boy. Barely able to stand, shivering—did you even feed the boy, Biggs?”

It was Khasil’a who answered instead of the chief. “We did, mother, but he has not entirely been able to keep things down well.”

A sharp look that made the Keeper cross his arms. “Intelligent as you are, have none of you thought about feeding him something _liquid?”_

A very heavy silence fell over the infirmary—G’raha noticed some other conjurers hustle about hurriedly while their headmistress chastised the Chief of the Garlond Ironworks and her son at length for not thinking of so simple a solution. Truth be told, he did feel vaguely dehydrated and licked his lips; the movement made Khasil stop her rant nigh immediately. For a split moment he feared he might become the subject of her negative attention because of that but all she did was gesture wildly at her son and his chief.

“Get outta here, ya oafs. I’ll take care of him. Heavens know he likely has more common sense than you.”

And with that, Chief Biggs and Khasil’a were out of the picture and before G’raha could even say a single word, she ushered him towards a free bed. At the very least she did not make him lie down, instead said that he looked ready to drop dead on his feet and was more than welcome to sit for the time being. With that, she scuttled about for a moment, called for a man to fetch her a glass of water, lukewarm, apparently this patient had been throwing up and anything too cold would upset his stomach further, before immediately starting standard procedures. Prodded and poked him, checked his pulse and narrowed her eyes. Then she leaned in after her colleague delivered the glass of water and went back to what he had been doing before.

“Say,” she whispered, “you’re the Keeper of the Crystal Tower, aren’t you.”

He blearily blinked at her before nodding. With that she backed off again, handed him the glass of water and whirled around.

“Pierroix, new patient’ll be staying a week—aether sickness, no clue what they did to get him that sick but it should be easy to balance him out. Probably accidentally dropped him somewhere close to corrupted crystals, doesn’t seem to be a Delayed Reaction case but make sure we have the counteragent stocked in any case.”

She left with that, and G’raha slowly sipped on the water. Lukewarm, just as she had said it should be. It tasted utterly stale and made him gag—he instead fought with his boots for a while with his shaking hands and laid down. Roughly two hours later Headmistress Khasil returned with Khasil’a in tow.

The younger Keeper was holding what looked like a heap of cloth—likely a uniform, judging from the blue hue. Khasil on the other hand carried a single glass of liquid.

G’raha’s stomach revolted at that sight. His miserable look made the older Keeper snort. “’Twould seem you know your fate, young man. Alas, there’s no escaping this. Especially seeing as the water clearly did not become you well.”

Ah, he did not miss infirmaries. They were necessary but outside of a few trips there whenever his reckless tendencies had gotten him injured somehow he had blessedly never been sick enough to be confined to one for too long. Until now.

Not a good start.

* * *

A week later he had not shown any signs of Delayed Reaction, and he realised that they would have quarantined him there regardless of his state. But after four miserable days of being unable to keep anything other than liquids down, G’raha had to admit that even the most mushy paste nonsense with the slightest hint of fishy flavour had tasted divine. As if the Twelve themselves had blessed this gross texture and turned the slush into a feast of the gods. He was encouraged to give something more solid a try upon being released from the infirmary in the Ironworks uniform, but G’raha honestly was more concerned with finding his way around the city.

Apparently the settlement had started out in this very place, and now it was the centrepiece of what many called one of the last bastions of mankind where the strong did not rule the weak. By any means it did not mean that Idyllshire was undefended, but as he had spent his time sitting in bed and hoping that he would be able to forget the taste of his disgusting charged water they made him ingest to get him used to the aetheric atmosphere of the world now rather than the atmosphere within the Crystal Tower, he had witnessed one thing that made him frown deeply.

It had been a Lalafellin warrior of some sort who had gotten dragged in by equally heavily armoured warriors. The sheer amount of blood had been astounding, and while the people clearly meant to keep it down as to not disturb the other patients, G’raha had overheard two nurses talking in hushed voices. Something about a band of bandits being back in the Hinterlands, something about a fire that had claimed Khasil’s eldest daughter not even a year ago. Just the fact that those two had been discussing evacuation plans should the worst come to pass and then agreed to check the stocks in case a prolonged fight with that group had left an even worse taste in his mouth as he sipped his medicine.

He was now accompanied by Chief Biggs, his steps still wobbly after a week in bed but at least he no longer felt as if his sanity was going all the way down to the seventh hell itself.

Back in Saint Coinach’s Find all those years ago he had walked alongside the Biggs he had known once like this. He had worn his usual attire, had his bow strapped to his back and he’d laughed about something or other. Now he was glum and silent, in the uniform of an Ironworks employee like Biggs had been, and a gunblade in a sheath by his side. Apparently in the past the actual gunbreakers had carried it differently, something about magnets that they could attach to their uniforms and the like, but this was easier to carry nowadays. And cheaper to make. It was sort of above him, considering that he had spent the better part of his adolescence learning how to properly use a bow and dodging people seeking to turn him into a thaumaturge or conjurer. Krile often commented on the fact that G’raha would make an excellent astrologian if he got his nose out of books and turned his eyes to the skies instead. G’raha had only told her that perhaps she ought to be an astrologian, seeing as her head was in the clouds for the most part.

Even just passing through the market was an adventure in itself now—within less than a bell he encountered several Goblins, a Kobold merchant, an Ixal donning an Ironworks uniform who saluted Chief Biggs, a Moogle much larger than the Black Shroud variants, and of all things a dragon somewhere off in a corner. A dragon attended by an Ishgardian Elezen, no less. If his ears didn’t betray him he even heard the very telltale prattle of a Sylph somewhere, but he was all but breathless by the time Chief Biggs stopped at a stall and asked if he was hungry.

G’raha muttered a “slightly, yes” and noticed way too late that the stall was run by a Xaela and a Namazu. A Namazu who unfortunately noticed him staring with eyes wide as saucers—which, unfortunately, was rather obvious on a Seeker’s face.

It was the Xaela who asked if G’raha was okay. He didn’t have an answer for that; the last settlement he had been in before he went to the World of Darkness had been Revenant’s Toll. Revenant’s Toll, which had been full of adventurers and Doman refugees, merchants and the chatter of the occasional Postmoogle, with spots of bright blue marking members of the Crystal Braves that were patrolling while the Scions were out or about and while the Warrior of Light was leaning over a counter chatting up one of Rowena’s employees, apparently trying to haggle down a piece of gear.

Idyllshire’s main market was nothing like that. In fact, this was what many people wanted Eorzea to be like—something where everyone was welcome to come and go as they pleased as long as there weren’t any unnecessary hostilities.

While he was unable to answer, Chief Biggs started spinning a tale of him having grown up on his lonesome somewhere in the wilderness, something or other of being found by someone out on a permanent post somewhere in the mountains of Ilsabard. He only mutely nodded along to these things, then thanked the vendors for the sandwich and wishing the earth would open up to immediately swallow him whole.

Thankfully, Chief Biggs seemed to understand that and instead bid him to follow. G’raha did so—and followed him from the centre of Idyllshire into what was the reclaimed part of old Sharlayan. The Answering Quarter, if he wasn’t mistaken—and rather than built for commerce, it was clear that this was where people lived. It was here that he started seeing patrols carrying weapons, the armoured people like the Lalafell from the last week.

And somewhere in the distance he saw the burnt remnants of a house where the city limit likely was. The amount of patrols increased to a ridiculous amount there, and G’raha realised that while Idyllshire might look like the culmination of what people wanted Eorzea to be, this was far from a peaceful time. Outside of here there were less than peaceful people.

“I reckon a Sharlayan like you knows what lies beyond Alexander further down the Thaliak.”

G’raha tore his eyes away from the burnt ruins off to the side and instead turned to look at the imposing machine sitting amidst its shield in the river. To think that this had taken place not too long after he had closed the doors… he knew he would have enjoyed helping Cid and the Warrior of Light with this machine even if Goblins and Primals were not exactly his forte. He instead tried to remember what he had learned about the abandoned new settlement—G’raha had not been in the exodus, being admitted to Sharlayan as a child rather than born here in Dravania. Vague memories of lessons taught, of Krile laughing as dust danced through the air in the library—

“The Great Gubal Library?”

One of the very few things that people who had taken part in the exodus lamented. The library and its keeper, Master Matoya, forever left on the continent they had abandoned—and G’raha, much like any Sharlayan who went to Eorzea, had more than once entertained the thought of seeking that wellspring of knowledge out if only to satisfy his own curiosity. He, of course, never went; the very moment he saw the Crystal Tower in Mor Dhona something compelled him to stay and offer his services as scholar on all things Allagan.

“Precisely that one. ‘S open to the public nowadays, we got a secondary workshop in a room Chief Biggs—not me, the one you knew, Master G’raha—ordered emptied after Chief Garlond’s passing.”

That could only mean that Master Matoya had either passed away back then or come out of the cave. G’raha did not quite dare thinking about the former but the latter seemed extremely unlikely.

“’Twas all thanks to the efforts of the Lady Krile that the library didn’t burn down at its earliest convenience, but alas. We’ve been keeping the thing safe since, some people of Idyllshire even taking up residence there to ensure it’s never unguarded.”

G’raha nodded. “A wise decision, if, given everything that happened, someone set the Warrior of Light loose within to disable most of the traps laid for intruders with brute force.”

“Snrk. Of course they did, albeit the first time they did so for their own interest. The second, the third time, the fifth time, not so much. ‘Twas more in the interest of Idyllshire and scholars in general before war broke out in earnest.”

He swore he almost heard the armoured boots click on the crystalline stairs again, saw the bow replaced with an axe between the ascent to throne to challenge Xande and the excursion into the very void itself to rescue three comrades. He wondered for a moment if they had still carried the axe then or seen it replaced with something else. G’raha scowled, looked into the distance, and then back at Chief Biggs.

“Thank you for talking us out of what happened at the market.”

The Roegadyn looked surprised, then scratched the back of his neck almost embarrassed. “No need to thank me, Master G’raha. I kinda did forget that you were out of the picture long before any sort of relations between the Spoken and the beast tribes came to fruition. ‘Course you’ll never have seen a Namazu and would start starin’, and starin’ is considered weird in Idyllshire.”

“I see. I shall keep that in mind from now on to prevent any sort of conflict.”

That earned him a surprised look. “I doubt anyone’d start a fight. Sure, Syorin talks tough for a pounce of catfish, but the Mol lad has her under control rather well. Not that anyone in the markets would start a physical fight. Verbal, maybe, but the worst you’ll earn is a slap from an Elezen whose feet you accidentally stepped on in the crowd.”

“Oddly specific, but duly noted, Chief Biggs.”

The Roegadyn nearly laughed, but it died in his throat as his expression darkened. “There is one more thing I must ask of you, Master G’raha. Try not to stray too far from the city limits. Or at least make certain you’re not on your own.”

With that the man turned around and started slowly walking. G’raha stared into the distance for a heartbeat longer—this place did not look dangerous the slightest but it only served tor remind him of what turmoil Eorzea had been after the Seventh. He had no idea what the realm had turned into in the last two centuries that followed the Eighth.

* * *

The workshop in Idyllshire turned out to be… bigger than he expected. Back in the day the Ironworks had had several smaller ones across all of Eorzea, one of the major ones right in Revenant’s Toll. He hadn’t had the pleasure of being inside, but he had had the pleasure of talking to one employee named Jessie who immediately started going into excruciating detail about what was wrong with that warehouse they were in. He had expected something of that sort here as well, but the very moment he walked through the doors he more felt like he had stepped into the Moraby Drydocks instead of a Garlond Ironworks workshop.

An airship not unlike the one they had gotten back to Idyllshire was currently undergoing repairs, and the people working on it all stopped for a moment to cheerfully greet Chief Biggs. There were several doors leading into smaller spaces—G’raha managed to make out one room being a kitchen, which meant that the one next to it was likely a break room of some sort. What the others were he had no idea, but it was amazing just how many people managed to still be around despite everything that had happened. Resilient, perhaps—or plain too stubborn to die.

Hells, one Elezen was even humming as she passed them by, raising a hand in greeting and then carrying on as if nothing had happened. Barely anyone batted an eyelash at the newcomer who was staring at them as if he had walked into a royal ball or something of the sort. The only ones that stopped for more than a split second to greet their boss were the ones that had been in Mor Dhona with him; G’raha vaguely recognised some faces here and there on occasion as Chief Biggs confidently strode through the mess and towards a room.

Likely his own office, G’raha figured and ducked under a meat beam that swung his way. His ears brushed against it, and he let out a small laugh when the Roegadyn carrying it apologised wildly for nearly hitting him with it. This place reminded him of Saint Coinach’s Find in the best possible ways.

But there was still this strange twinge to the air, something that felt decidedly off. This wasn’t right. Hells, Khasil’a had had a point when he said that G’raha acted very much unlike a Seeker his age. He remembered it so very clearly, acting like the fool full of energy without a care in the world. Now he had the weight of Allag’s hopes after the Calamity on his back, and it most definitely sounded as if Cid had added to that weight before he passed away.

Thank to the brooding he nearly missed the room that Chief Biggs opened, nearly walked past the man. The Roegadyn said nothing as G’raha mumbled an apology and followed him into that room. He had been expecting an office, drab and boring and perhaps with some plans here and there. There was no way that this man would be the same kind of mess as Cid Garlond had been.

The room he found himself in was stacked with familiar sights from floor to ceiling. Allagan nodes and tomestones, parts of dismantled general tech, warmachina and even a good heap of what looked like replicas of clothes that were common back then were scattered about. Shelves bulged under the weight of countless tomes—some written in modern Eorzean, authors G’raha had heard of, some he had even met while travelling around Eorzea; some others in Allagan script pre-domination and post-Calamity. Hells, there was even a small-scale replica of the Crystal Tower in the middle of the room, and a free spot on the wall was positively plastered in notes, maps, connected with red lines and several different kinds of handwriting on the papers that looked as if some had been placed there last week and some had been on there for a century… or two.

Indeed, he spied Cid’s handwriting on one—part of it was crossed through with a different pen, with a different, much neater handwriting correcting something or other. G’raha didn’t have time to read it before Chief Biggs cleared his throat.

“This used to be the Founder’s study. Admittedly, Chief R’mjohl turned it more into an Allagan storage hellscape while we worked on how to get you out of the tower, but… it’s where we hoard what survived Saint Coinach’s Find’s torching about a hundred years ago and what the House of Splendors forked over for our research.”

It was an impressive collection. If G’raha himself weren’t a relic of this sort these days then he would have been thrilled to dig through here for days on end. But in theory he belonged into one of these stacks, stashed away for proper research. The living key to the Crystal Tower.

His silence was likely making Chief Biggs uncomfortable, because the Roegadyn shifted several times before letting out an almost weary sigh.

“Look, we… we kind of ran you over right after waking you up. Before you ask, Master G’raha, this isn’t because Khasil chewed us out. We did assume you would just… do as Tias do and immediately explode with enthusiasm for something. We were wrong, by the gods were we wrong.”

He blinked a few times.

“You’re free to come and go as you please, Master G’raha. In a week or two we will be going to the Great Gubal Library, and you are free to tag along if you’d like. But for now, do as you please.” Chief Biggs handed over two keys. “One’s for the workshop, one’s for this room. If you’ve a mind to leave, make sure you talk to the Hyuran lass called Kara before you go, though. Walking around in an official Ironworks uniform should get you most things, but she’s been tasked with giving you a bunch of Gil should the need arise.”

* * *

Seekers were supposed to be diurnal, but for someone who had most definitely been born in a Seeker tribe in Ilsabard G’raha had always preferred reading in the dark. It had made him a social outcast amongst the other kids in his tribe, the fact that he was the only Tia notwithstanding. And that wasn’t even factoring in the fact that the other kids called his red eye freaky. He’d taken to hiding it under his red hair long before the tribe figured that it would be better if they sent the intelligent kid to Sharlayan. Come Sharlayan he had made no efforts talking to anyone and stuck to his books—to the point that it caught the attention of Master Galuf. And the rest of that was, as people would say, history; with Galuf came his adoptive granddaughter Krile, with Krile came him finally opening up a little and the rest of his studies that all led him to Eorzea and inevitably to the Crystal Tower.

It was long past sundown when he stopped brooding and got back up. He’d been sitting there completely still for a few hours, trying to figure out what it was that he wanted to do. He’d been so certain he would immediately get roped into working alongside the Ironworks once he was back on his feet that he didn’t really know what he was supposed to do now. Part of him wanted to immediately curl up and die, the other part wanted to dig through this marvellous cache of Allagan treasures—and the last part of him, the rational part, knew that he was an Allagan relic and a relic in general by now and instead sat here brooding over what this was supposed to mean.

He clearly remembered himself saying that the future was where his destiny awaited, but being in the future now made it hard to think straight. He hadn’t really had much time to think about it back then—Doga and Unei had given him this gift and he was not going to waste it. But now that this purpose of getting the Crystal Tower under control was not his first and foremost thought, all he _could_ think about were two things.

One, the forlorn faces of his colleagues and friends before they swore their heartfelt oaths to wake him up before he knew it.

Two, the Warrior of Light offering him a hand and laughing after they managed to fell Cerberus together—G’raha had somehow managed to get himself gobbled up, but somehow that had proven advantageous to the fight. Not something he would quite like to repeat but everything about that voidsent vanished into thin air when it died, leaving him sitting on the ground back to his normal size, surprisingly dry for someone who had resolved to go down fighting and shooting volleys of arrows around before he was properly digested.

He didn’t know why that memory was so strikingly prominent right now, but his made his heavy heart heavier; for the longest time he had almost desperately wanted to follow the Warrior of Light around were it not for Rammbroes and the Crystal Tower keeping him moored to Saint Coinach’s find. All those tall tales about an adventurer striking down gods with naught but bow and arrow but switching to an axe once they became known as Warrior of Light had intrigued him. Meeting them in the flesh had been enlightening.

But fighting alongside them had been something else entirely. Hells, it had made him painfully aware that perhaps he was rather infatuated with them. The way they all but danced around whatever the World of Darkness threw at them with surprising ease, the way they still offered him a hand then, how they had put a hand on his shoulder after taking out a clone of Xande that spouted nonsense about death and decay. How surprisingly light that touch was despite the fact they wore armour and were strong enough to move mountains. It seemed to fit to the same person who laughed when they had to share a tent with him, how they listened to him rambling about things in the tower that he noticed when excursions included him.

He had sounded exactly like the young man that he was supposed to be back then. He even dropped the act around them, had let his fears get through his carefully constructed walls—something that only Galuf, Krile and Rammbroes had managed before the Warrior of Light.

G’raha furiously shook his head. The sun had long set when he banished these thoughts, turned on a light in the room and grabbed the nearest stack of reports. He skipped through the lines, scattered the pages one by one hoping to glean something from them.

They were damage reports. Something about an uprising in Ishgard, about one Estinien Wyrmblood being found barely clinging to life and laughing over the dead body of the last Garlean emperor. Of said man, apparently the former Azure Dragoon of Ishgard, dying with the former Lord Commander’s name on his lips. He scattered the pages of that report on the ground, furiously skipping lines, paragraphs, barely absorbing the information presented within.

It wasn’t until he saw a name that meant something to him, in a handwriting that he knew better than his own.

This part of this stack of papers had been written by Krile. In a hurry, seeing as her neat letters were all loopy and uneven, as if her hand had been shaking while she wrote it.

* * *

_He’s dead._  
_Alphinaud is dead, and with him goes one of the last Scions. I failed to get Alisaie and the Warrior of Light to Idyllshire and they paid for it with their lives, and now Alphinaud dies in distant Garlemald. Alongside the Ascian Emet-Selch and the bloody Black Wolf. What a way to go, for someone who so very loudly and very proudly proclaimed that his dream was no less than the salvation of this star. Oh, Alphinaud. You foolish, foolish boy. You die a hero’s death for a star in shambles._  
_But I cannot let grief overwhelm me._  
_My research has crawled to a standstill, and Nero Scaeva’s is not going any better. Perhaps I should put aside mine for a while and see what I can do to help with the Delayed Reaction counteragent—just the other day a teenage Viera succumbed to it. The poor kid had been getting steadily worse, and the people who dragged her to Idyllshire could do naught but try to make it as painless as possible. But still, something truly bothers me about some of these Delayed Reaction deaths. Tataru’s most of all, but there have been so many peculiar cases that I am fairly certain that a grand majority of the Delayed Reaction deaths in recent years have been something else altogether._  
  
_Perhaps my answer lies with the Ardor itself. If only we knew more about what the Ascians seek to gain from it—answers we lack and that we will never get. With Emet-Selch gone only Elidibus remains on the Source. It would seem that we managed to behead Cerberus twice and only have to deal with the remaining head._  
_Assuming we can even muster the strength to do so. Everything and everyone in Idyllshire has lost their vigour, has lost their will to go on and go beyond except for those under the Ironworks. By the hells themselves, I feel it wearing away at me. The Echo is more curse than blessing, and every day sees another supporting pillar crumble and fall._  
_ How long until we all succumb to madness? Will Delayed Reaction see us all dead before that?_  
  
_I overheard Cid the other day before the news reached us. He said that when Alphinaud returns from wherever in Garlemald he i__s__, he would be taking the boy to the Syrcus Trench. A scholar of his knowledge might force something out of the tower that Raha closed off years ago._  
_Nothing of the sort will be happening now. Nero even closed his eyes and pinched his nose when he heard the news, saying that Garlond was going to not take this well. After all Cid has ever been an ally to the Scions._  
_I cannot help but wonder if… if there is even still life within the Crystal Tower. It certainly is still powered down and dormant, yes—but who is to say that Raha did not suffocate in his sleep when Black Rose reached Mor Dhona? Will we one day open the tower to find out that the keeper of the tower, my dear friend, has long since departed this mortal coil, perhaps to chase the Warrior of Light into their next adventure once they are reincarnated?_  
  
_I cannot stand still. Not now. Not when Alphinaud quite literally died to take down the Ascian responsible for this mess. Not when Raha might still be asleep in that tower, dreaming of a better tomorrow that he might wake up to. I will not have him wake up to ruins._  
_ Or if he does, then I hope at least Idyllshire will still stand and welcome him with the same open arms as they welcomed me._

* * *

He very, very desperately wanted to break into Alexander and use the Primal for himself. He wanted to go back to where he told NOAH that the future was where his destiny awaited—and punch himself in the guts. Beat himself senseless. Drag himself out by the tail and toss him at Rammbroes, Cid, the Warrior of Light, _anyone._

No amount of ancient Allagan hopes and dreams hoisted upon him because of his ancestor’s decision was worth the amount of suffering that his friends went through and that he wasn’t even there for.

He sobbed as he tossed the rest of the papers away and curled up on the floor. It was gross. It was pathetic. He still wasn’t recovered properly but thank the heavens he managed to keep that sandwich in.

Chief Biggs woke him on the morrow, and every bone in his body hurt. His tail was stiff. His ears were ringing. He blearily blinked his eyes open and he knew judging from the expression the man wore that they were bloodshot. Perhaps, he thought with a wry smile as he struggled to his feet, they were as red as his irises now.

There seemed to be something that Chief Biggs wanted to say to him, but he instead settled for what he came in here for in the first place.

“Khasil’a told me he wanted to have you back at the infirmary at your earliest convenience, Master G’raha. Nothing serious, he said, but the boy seems interested in something… are you able to walk?”

“Just fine,” he croaked and left before any more well-meaning attempts at supporting him were made.


	5. ACT I

_Alisaie,_

_If this letter reaches you and the Warrior of Light, there is a fair chance I will be dead. Perhaps news of that will have reached you before this letter does, perhaps this is the first you hear of it. If you can hear it. Are you, the reader, by chance not my sister—was my hunch correct that she died before me? It has been so long since I heard from any of the Scions. The last time I saw them was in Doma, years ago by this point. Whether you are my sister or not, I feel like I should explain what precisely happened in Garlemald._  
  
_ Gaius and I have been observing the capital for quite a while. For what used to be the oppressive regime that would see all of us conquered and subjugated to their will, it fell into chaos surprisingly quickly following Zenos zos Galvus’ departure. Even faster, however, was that chaos contained after survivors of Black Rose started pouring into the city walls and a man called Luneth took over affairs. A month, roughly. Short enough that the empire can uphold the illusion of silence and control, long enough to tire the survivors out._  
_ For all the years we spent here, Gaius only but recently realised something of import._  
_ Early on, nearly immediately after Maxima’s departure, he did wonder if the clones of Emperor Solus meant something in regards to the Ascians. Disposable vessels are far from encouraging—I reckon a vessel that fights back is less desirable for a pragmatic, if not even lazy individual such as Emet-Selch._  
_ Too late did we realise that perhaps that was precisely what was going on here. Governor Luneth is an elusive kind, his face hidden and his intentions veiled just in kind. It had been a theory that I shared previously._  
  
_ Surely enough, when we did catch but a glimpse of his face, Gaius nigh immediately started cursing._  
  
_ For the longest time I did not quite dare call him an ally—after all he would have seen us all killed if that had been what it would have taken to see Eorzea conquered. For the longest time he upheld his nonsensical idea of the strong ruling the weak and did not change his mind until a few years ago. After seeing what we have in the provinces, however, he… changed. Started offering helping hands to the downtrodden, started putting people out of their misery only if they so desired. Started oft nigh hopeless fights against the strong stomping on the backs of the weak before we departed for the capital._  
_ It does not absolve him of his crimes._  
_ But it did show me that even the worst can change for the better if given enough time to understand the errors of their ways. Would that it were less of a terrible situation bringing about this change._  
  
_ Governor Luneth of the Garlean Empire is none else than a clone of Emperor Solus zos Galvus—and the Ascian Emet-Selch, overseeing the absolute decay of the empire he so painstakingly built upon the wretched peaks of Garlemald by dragging their most dire weakness out into the light and feeding their egos._  
_ There were countless of these clones. Gaius put most of them to the sword, seeing as they were creatures barely able to live on their own. They are mindless, childish in their demeanour even. But the one sitting on the vacant throne of the empire is possessed of a vile will, a determination to see this Calamity last longer and longer so another Shard can be Rejoined._  
  
_ Perhaps it is foolhardy to hope that I will still live on the morrow._  
_ We have infiltrated the palace with naught more than a heavy-handed plan forged in a desperate attempt to nick another Calamity in the bud. Substantial amounts of aether are needed to vanquish an Ascian. Awash with light and decay as Garlemald is, gathering up enough light-aspected aether should be the least of my troubles. The true trouble lies in having enough to strike true and cleave the Ascian clean into pieces as the Warrior of Light did._  
_ They nigh failed in killing Nabriales because of a lack of aether, the sole remedy being a substantial amount of living aether. We lack white Auracite. Our only chance is to quite literally blast him with enough aether and hope it works. Most of the clones are dead, those with enough of an understanding that they are living beings with a sense of self we let go. Even should we fail, Emet-Selch will likely retreat for a while, hopefully to lick his wounds._  
  
_ A blade of aether, forged out of the light aether that stagnates all around us—and our very lives, offered up to strike. To strike true, I hope._  
_ Will this be a fool’s errand?_  
_ Will our deaths be for naught in the end?_  
_ We cannot know unless we try. What history makes of us, this unlikely pair, I cannot say._  
_ I care not._  
_ I have to try this, for this star I love so dearly. Unlikely allies, perhaps, but Gaius is of the same mind. A villain he may be, but he is a villain on my side and has been on my side for the years in the wake of the Calamity. It feels right to end this as it will._  
_ To Alisaie, to the reader of this letter should she have passed away while I was gone—I’m sorry._  
_ May the Mothercrystal guide our souls back to be reborn as siblings once again, dearest sister. I love you. I’m sorry._

_Note: This letter was delivered to Krile Mayer Baldesion in Idyllshire—Alisaie Leveilleur was long dead by the time it arrived._  
_ It is one of two known records of what precisely happened in the Garlean capital on the day Governor Luneth was assassinated by Gaius Baelsar and Alphinaud Leveilleur._  
_ See Chapter 13, “The XIVth Legion” for notes on Gaius van Baelsar and Chapter 36, “Allies of the Seventh Dawn” for notes on Gaius Baelsar._  
_ See Chapter 37, “Calamitous Omens” for notes on Ascians and the Ascian Emet-Selch._

_(Excerpt from 'Leap Wishes: A History of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn' by Historian Singing Tempest)_

* * *

“Ah, there you are! Oh-oh dear. Master G’raha, are you unwell? Should I call for my mother?”

He shook his head slightly and dragged a hand down his face with a slight groan. Even walking back here had not managed to banish the sore weariness out of his bones—then again, nothing likely ever would. Living beings were not meant to sleep on the floor, and the were most definitely not meant to sleep for two centuries. At least he could attribute the physical exhaustion to that.

“No, you needn’t bother her for a fool sleeping on the floor.”

Khasil’a’s ears were drawn back a little—he wasn’t buying it entirely, but he did not pry further.

“Chief Biggs said you needed something from me?”

“Yes, quite, but I was hoping you would be well-rested after being released from here. Perhaps a week was too little—“

G’raha shook his head slowly. “I am quite fine. Physically.”

The conjurer didn’t seem entirely certain what to make of this statement, but at the very least he let it rest. Perhaps not entirely telling the truth was counterproductive at best and actively detrimental at worst, but G’raha found he didn’t really care. He wanted to know what Khasil’a wanted and then would likely spend his day either sitting somewhere in silence or digging through the room Chief Biggs had to graciously offered him. It was better than stewing over those things he never got to say because he decided that the Crystal Tower needed a proper Allagan royal to control it.

Khasil’a shuffled awkwardly, then nodded and took in a deep breath.

“Alright. The bandits are on the move away from the Hinterlands, the guards managed to drive them away and prevent them from attacking us again. I was… asked to deliver something to a trio of people who live in the Answering Quarter—a salve of some sort, one has a frail constitution. I was just wondering if you… wanted to accompany me. J-Just because I know Chief Biggs won’t let you go out on your own, and I’m not allowed to go alone either.”

If it weren’t for the mischievous glint in Khasil’a’s eyes, G’raha would have declined that offer. But there was something about the conjurer’s ears that were pointed straight at him that made him think of the Warrior of Light. They had talked about forays into ruins overrun with voidsent and whatnot the same way, sometimes tossed G’raha some sort of thing they had picked up in there. Usually it was of Allagan make, sometimes it were a handful tomestones. Just the fact that an adventurer shared their tomestones with a scholar when the House of Splendors was right in Revenant’s Toll and offered rather useful compensation for any tomes handed over was heartwarming in more than one way. More than once it had wound up costing both of them a good amount of sleep as they asked G’raha what any of these things were and he went off on a tangent about it.

The worst was that time Rammbroes found them asleep on the ground together, his tail wrapped around their leg, a book on his chest, and them sleeping on his arm. Thank goodness the two of them were still in street clothes—even mere evening garb would have been compromising and highly embarrassing, to say the least.

Khasil’a seemed to have that same spark they had, the urge to travel around and see thing for himself. Thus, even though he was exhausted and upset, he nodded.

“I can hardly say no to a chance to see New Sharlayan or what remains of it, can I?”

The Keeper beamed at him and quickly ducked under a desk to retrieve a bag. A few bottles clinked inside there, and before G’raha knew it he was following Khasil’a through Idyllshire.

Once again no one really batted an eyelash at the new face, seeing as he was wearing an Ironworks uniform and was following a conjurer clearly on a mission around—only now did G’raha realise that Khasil’a was not wearing a uniform himself. Odd. But perhaps this was an arrangement of some sort between the Ironworks and Idyllshire itself; they likely did not have a proper medic amongst their group. And travelling around like that was an experience that many medics needed.

The Keeper explained some facilities and recounted little bits of history as they walked—Idyllshire had managed to not only survive the Calamity, it positively thrived afterwards. It had been founded by adventurers and Goblins back in the day, had been home to not only the very few Scion survivors for the longest time but also welcomed everyone regardless of their place of birth. Khasil’a said that after G’raha watched almost with mild horror as a Sylph started talking animatedly with a tall, lean woman with a Garlean third eye. Something like that had been almost unthinkable back in his day, notable exceptions like Cid Garlond only reinforcing the hostility between the beast tribes and Garleans especially.

He was tense, he was tired, and Khasil’a was quite obviously trying to ease the tension a little. But while G’raha could appreciate the thought behind it, he felt as if the younger Keeper was trying to coax him out of his shell—just as Galuf had done, as Krile had done, as Rammbroes and Cid had done. Only the Warrior of Light had succeeded properly, had unearthed both the foolish dreamer who wanted to travel with the restless energy and love for a realm that did not know him and the terrified child that hid away his allegedly ugly, freaky eye in an attempt to at least be ignored rather than called names.

In the week he spent in the infirmary, G’raha had built walls around his raw heart. He wasn’t going to let anyone else in—because he could very simply walk back to Mod Dhona, open and close the doors and sleep away another century or five. At least then the Ironworks who needed his help would be acquaintances with no emotional value attached to them, and perhaps the utter agony of losing NOAH would have settled into something a lot more raw but healing by then.

Khasil’a saluted a soldier who stopped them. G’raha missed most of the conversation, but eventually the conjurer pulled a wand from the bag he carried and waved it about. That made his attention snap back to whatever was going on here.

“—under the late Padjali warden of the arts. You know that, Toeglahz!”

The soldier shook his head, then adjusted his lance to point at G’raha. “I do indeed, Khasil’a. What I don’t know is the new face and if he can be trusted with you.”

The Keeper was bristling, his long ears drawn back and his fangs likely bared at the man. A childish gesture, but one that Miqo’te fell back to when they felt someone was stepping on their tails. G’raha himself shrugged at the stranger, ears held neutral and his tail swaying calmly.

“I have no intentions of hurting Khasil’a or seeing him hurt, if that is what you are worried about,” he eventually said when the man did not lower his weapon the slightest.

The Roegadyn harrumphed, not changing his stance at all. “You may don the colours of the Ironworks, but I’ve seen enough people come and go to know that pureblooded Seekers are not to be trusted.”

“Ugh, not this again!” Khasil’a accompanied that exclamation with a cross between a guttural growl and a high-pitched hiss—a funny sound, but disconcerting to listen to. It was frustration, pure frustration doubled up with a heavy emotion that G’raha couldn’t read without seeing his face. “Yes, Seekers like that are rare! Male ones even rarer! Most of them thrive in wildernesses and kill for fun, we should have never let that group into Idyllshire and yes, yes! Mhinne was the one to pay for that with her life! Yes, I can still see the fires and all that! But he’s not one of them, and I will not have you verbally or otherwise attack someone who’s unrelated to her death in a likely good-hearted attempt to keep me safe! But Mhinne is _dead,_ Toeglahz; mother would not have taken care of him when he arrived if she harboured even the slightest thought that he would turn out like these Seekers!” His tail was puffed out, his ears were completely flat, and his shoulders were shaking. Hells, the Roegadyn had gone kind of pale. “You _will_ let us through, Toeglahz—because we _will_ come back. Unharmed.”

Without waiting for an answer, Khasil’a stomped past the man. G’raha considered throwing a glare at the man for a split second, but he instead pulled the gunblade from its sheath and hurried after the Keeper who had started running by now.

This close to the settlement nothing really stirred, though in the distance he spied a few overgrown insects lazily floating about the overgrown wilderness between the abandoned ruins of Sharlayan. G’raha found Khasil’a leaning against a half-standing wall covered in ivy, furiously wiping his own face. It was ugly splotchy red—a mixture of seething rage and unfiltered sadness. Something he could relate to, all things considered, even though Khasil’a’s outburst seemed not entirely typical for him.

“Sorry,” the Keeper muttered and continued wiping his face. “You’ve probably seen the burnt remnants of the barracks. None of us really had the heart to rebuild them. But Toeglahz and Mhinne were best friends, so he thinks himself something of an older brother to me.”

G’raha only quietly nodded. Misplaced fear of someone getting hurt again—it wasn’t hard to guess that Mhinne was the name of Khasil’s dead daughter and therefore Khasil’a’s late older sister.

A few minutes passed in silence, then Khasil’a let out a long, weary sigh and peeled himself off the wall. He had lost the bounce in his step, yes, but he still tried to crack a smile at G’raha. A gesture he could appreciate, but one that mildly concerned him in any case.

“Ugh, whatever. Let’s get going, shall we? We’ve got about an hour on foot to go to get where I have to drop this, if you’re up for it still.”

He shook his head slightly. “Up for it if you are, but if you permit me the question—drop it?”

That seemed to knock the upset gloom out of Khasil’a for a moment as he stared. Then he smacked his free hand into his face with a groan. “Oh, good grief. I forgot to mention that they’re kind of recluse, didn’t I. Yes, drop off. We have an arrangement. We drop the things off at a certain place, they drop off things they unearth around the ruins in another. It’s rare to run into them, but the three of them were part of the reason why Chief Biggs and the Ironworks were actually able to open the Crystal Tower.”

It sounded almost like Master Matoya, but G’raha kept that to himself. He snorted and the two of them walked side by side for a while while Khasil’a started talking about those three in detail.

Apparently they were the closest thing to what people in the past like G’raha would have called adventurers, although they only stayed in the Hinterlands. They had been here for the better part of ten years or so, politely declining all attempts to make them settle in Idyllshire proper but not once acting against them. Hells, apparently they had saved some people from scavengers and brigands out for blood in the past.

A trio—two mages, one skilled in thaumaturgy and one skilled in conjury, accompanied by an expert in Magitek of both Allagan and Garlean origin who carried a gun.

“Dorgann and Suneira are the mages, the tech’s name is Helios. Chief Biggs tried to recruit all three of them to our cause the one time I met them, but they declined faster than you can say ‘Garlond Ironworks’. Maybe it’s because they’re just that recluse, but Mhinne always said that something about those three felt odd, as if there was more to the story. ‘Specially seeing as Dorgann and Suneira usually wear masks that hide their faces, and Helios keeps most of his face hidden under a cowl. Some would say they can’t be trusted because of that, but their actions speak louder than their hidden faces.”

For all they knew, Khasil’a added, maybe they were hiding their faces because they were disfigured somehow. Battle scars awful enough to scare away people, perhaps. Or something far more sinister, something he didn’t go into detail with. But even when G’raha carefully suggested that perhaps this Helios figure might be an Ascian, Khasil’a laughed it off.

“No, no I don’t think so. An Ascian would think themselves too self-important to do any of this—Helios refuses to take credit for _anything_ he does. Talks himself down and utterly and completely loathes the idea of being praised. Besides,” and with that Khasil’a stopped walking to look around. “Besides. There are rumours of Echo-bearers hailing from Gyr Abania. If I were an Ascian, I would investigate that, lest we have a Warrior of Light on our hands.”

G’raha flinched.

* * *

He felt eyes upon him when they reached their destination—something pricked at the corners of his consciousness, something oddly familiar and terrifying. He lowered his head and raised his hand to clutch at it as he had in the past, whenever a pang of pain went through his skull. It had always happened in relation to something Allagan that brought him closer to unveiling Princess Salina and Desch’s wishes for the future. It had unloaded this heavy weight upon his shoulders when Doga and Unei decided to stay behind after giving him enough of their blood to ensure that he would have full control over the Crystal Tower. In all but name G’raha was an Allagan prince far, far from home.

And now he was experiencing a headache that related to Allag out here, in the middle of nowhere, while he felt as if he was being watched.

A low hiss went through his skull, rattled him to his bones. It sounded like a voice trying to tell him something, and he couldn’t help but wonder if that was how the Warrior of Light had felt every time the Echo took them to the past. But the hissing subsided while Khasil’a placed the bag down, the bottles in there clinking gently in the early afternoon sun that had managed to push past the clouds by now. The light was pale and hurt his eyes, but that was likely thanks to the headache that was back to haunt him.

Then he heard a rustle.

His ears immediately twitched to the side the noise came from and he quickly dropped his hand to the weapon. He closed the little distance between him and Khasil’a, gunblade at the ready and pointed at where the noise was coming from.

There was a person there, and they raised their hands slowly.

“I am unarmed and mean no harm—say, is that you, Khasil’a?”

“You can sheathe your weapon, Master G’raha. Yes, it’s me, Helios.”

Khasil’a had not been lying. The man was tall, though slouched slightly as he walked forward. His face was indeed mostly covered by a cowl, the only thing in plain sight his jaw and mouth, and the surprisingly silky-looking black ponytail that was slung over his shoulder and fell out of the cowl.

And true to his words, unarmed. G’raha narrowed his eyes and tried to ignore the splitting pain that still shot through his head—and he did not lower the weapon.

“No one would walk around the wilderness unarmed. You’re not alone, are you?”

“Master G’raha!”

Helios… laughed. His voice was smooth, too smooth for comfort. There was a decidedly Garlean drawl in his voice that reminded G’raha of Nero as he started speaking again, though he sounded as good-natured as Cid usually did as long as Nero was not involved. How peculiar. “Sharp, aren’t you? Dorgann is nearby.”

Khasil’a shoved G’raha aside after ducking for the bag again. He very boldly for someone who had been crying and screaming but an hour ago walked over to this strange man, and held out that bag. The bottles inside clinked.

“Suneira has taken ill again, hasn’t she? Mother made certain there were extras this time around—the man with me is the Keeper of the Crystal Tower that your research helped awaken. So please, take it and make sure she gets well soon. If things get worse, mother bade me to tell you to bring her to Idyllshire and she would be more than happy to take care of her; it’s the least she could do after all those herbs and whatnot that were in the batch alongside the elements that made the key to the tower.”

The man and the conjurer started talking, but G’raha kept on bristling. Something here was off, something was screeching at him to be careful around this man and he had no idea why. This was his first time meeting him. Helios was perfectly friendly, listened to the things Khasil’a said about the medicine, how to administer it and what to expect. He was bloody unarmed, but somehow G’raha felt as if he was going to get shot in the back the second he stopped paying attention to this stranger. It did not help that while Dorgann was allegedly nearby there was no sign of that man. Through his headache he continued feeling as if he was being watched, turned around and kept looking and found nothing. It wasn’t until Helios and Khasil’a bade each other farewell that the intense feeling of something being _wrong_ subsided—and the man immediately made every hair on his body stand with his next words.

“Master G’raha, was it? Pray, make certain that the Mothercrystal does not call for you soon. We can ill afford losing all those sacrifices made by you and your siblings in arms to get you to this point, now can we.”

Before he could even utter a confused ‘what’, Helios had already started walking, waved his hand nonchalantly and vanished behind a nearby ruin.

* * *

The Roegadyn whose name he had forgotten had at the very least muttered an apology to him and then asked Khasil’a to accompany him back to the infirmary. Despite the utter seething fury earlier, Khasil’a seemed quick to forgive the man, and G’raha slowly followed the roads here and there. His head was still throbbing, and even through the general noise of a settlement he heard a distant hissing somewhere in the back of his head.

Marvellous—he was still going insane, apparently. Because the hissing was starting to sound more and more like something or someone trying to get his attention. But no matter where he looked, no matter how many times he turned he saw nothing. Or at least no one addressing him directly—he had no idea where precisely he had wound up in the end other than he heard the familiar noise of machinery hard at work for something or other. It looked like some sort of industrial district, an open-roofed area with several stalls and tables, chairs and plenty of people doing business.

It was unmistakeably a branch of the House of Splendors. Hells, there were even tomestones stacked on shelves, and G’raha was barely able to dodge a Chocobo trying to peck at him in hopes of finding something edible on this stranger. The owner immediately scolded the bird and apologised to him, a grin on her face as she pat its side. G’raha shook his head, said that it was no problem at all—only after she left did he realise that the Chocobo had been black. A rarity outside of Ishgard, and that Elezen had had the look of someone who spent a lot of time outside in the sun about her.

Sharlayan and even Saint Coinach’s Find had never been like that. Even Revenant’s Toll had been mostly adventurers and people affiliated with the House of Splendors or the Scions, a steady bustle streaming through but never staying long.

Here he saw beastmen and Spoken side by side, most of them sitting around and drinking ale. It was afternoon, so a handful traders were amongst the crowd, and he even spied a familiar blue uniform vanish through another door somewhere. This looked the way Revenant’s Toll had felt to him the back then, though interlaced with several languages and the rather telling squawking of an Ixal from one corner.

It took him a moment to even _register_ the noise properly and now there was no way to get it out of his head. It was loud. He drew his ears back and backed away, backed into a Highlander who he hurriedly apologised to and tried to back away further. He heard several conversations, from unpaid tabs to illness to a discussion about the state of some city or another, a heated debate about Dravanians and a group of people who called themselves Landlords, something or other about one of the larger remaining settlements in Coerthas burning to the ground with barely any survivors and earthquakes in Gyr Abania that had torn a new hole into Rhalgr’s Reach—by that point he had his hands on his ears and finally found the door he had walked in through again.

He _ran._

When he stopped again he was somewhere much calmer, with a fountain as the only noise in the place.

That, and a gaggle of children who looked at him as he stumbled down the stairs.

For a long, long moment all was still and silent except for the ringing in his ears—and then the children all calmly jogged over to give him a welcome.

“Hello, hello!”

“Good afternoon, sir!”

“Hey! Hello!”

Still too loud for him. The children watched him wince at that, and all of them fell quiet near immediately. A Lalafell stepped forward, likely the leader of that merry bunch, and she bowed to him politely. He did his best at returning the gesture despite everything; these children weren’t the cause of his migraine and deserved to have their politeness returned. Indeed, the worried faces all lit up again.

“You look like you just came from somewhere loud and exhausting, sir.”

He forced a pained grin out of him. “That I indeed do.”

A giggle. “The caretakers look like that sometimes when they come back from getting things, too. Usually they sit down somewhere outside—we don’t mind if you sit down at the fountain! If you want to.” She squinted a little. “It’s not the first time a new Ironworks person gets overwhelmed by Idyllshire!”

Ah. Caretakers. He nodded at the children gratefully and even let a small Miqo’te child grab his hand and guide him over to the fountain to sit down. Orphans. Of course there would be an orphanage somewhere; although these children all looked extremely well-kept. Back in his time after the Calamity that had been far from the case, although he realised with a grim jolt that it had been two hundred years. Of course things in one of the biggest settlements around would settle after that many mortal lifetimes.

If nothing else, these children seemed _delighted_ to have him stumble into their little game. He noticed several wooden swords and an assortment of little slings and such around. One Hyur proudly boasted that he was going to learn how to use a weapon like the one G’raha carried and that he would join the city guard. One Elezen girl immediately butted back that there was no way he was going to ever be able to lift one of these things—it was longer than him and there was no way he was ever going to hit a growth spurt.

“Nuh-uh! You just watch! I’m going to be as tall as the Warrior of Light, and then I’ll take Ishgard back from those brigands!”

There it was. That sharp, lonely sting that shot through his body. Of course one kid immediately noticed that his ears drooped—she nudged his leg a little, seeing as she had been sitting on the ground next to the fountain.

“Are you from Coerthas, sir? I can tell these buffoons to stop talking about Ishgard.”

He shook his head. “No, no. Mor Dhona. I just—I.” He tried to think about the rough timeline he had been given a week ago, tried to remember something or other that might be taught in history lessons that little orphans living in Idyllshire might learn. He eventually settled for mumbling something or other about brigands, and another kid stomped over to the two play-fighting by now and told them to shut the hell up.

He missed the agitated conversation, though bits and pieces sounded a lot like that one kid was telling them that he was like all of them. And perhaps brigands weren’t the best thing to bring up.

He appreciated the gesture, truly he did. But there was something pathetic about a grown man being looked after by a bunch of orphans who all looked as if they had gone through hell earlier in their lives than him. The Miqo’te kid that had led him to the fountain only had one ear. The Lalafell who had bowed to him, now that he looked at her properly, most definitely couldn’t see. The rest all had a different assortment of scars. Just as hearing that story about Khasil’a’s sister earlier, he suddenly realised that every single soul in this city had their own tragedy to tell.

Somehow they all managed to keep their heads high despite that.

The kids were all looking at him rather worriedly, but perhaps that thought was what he needed to have all along. If they all managed to be strong, then he would have to manage as well. Thus, he let out a long sigh and rubbed his temples a little.

“You know, perhaps I’m a different sort of adult from your caretakers. Do you have a spare weapon for me, maybe?”

They all looked at him with wide eyes.

“I may not be a city guard or the Warrior of Light, I may not even be particularly good at it, but perhaps you could teach me your best tricks and I can teach you all mine?”

He did remember the Warrior of Light laughing as they were accosted by several children, mostly Doman. He entertained them, promised to teach them about being an adventurer and apparently did so before they themselves returned to Saint Coinach’s Find the next day. This was something they would have done as well, and he could swear he could hear them chuckle at him from behind that fountain as he stood up and the children excitedly handed him a small wooden sword.

This wasn’t exactly the future he had imagined he would wake up in, but he might as well try and see if this was something worth fighting for. He knew that the Warrior of Light and the Scions would have—but G’raha was neither of these. Perhaps he could have been had he not locked himself in the tower.

But listening to these children excitedly compare him to the stories of the Warrior of Light who fearlessly strode from battle to battle, who won the unwinnable, he could imagine all those long gone laugh at that comparison. He wasn’t much of a fighter, he wasn’t in good form—but for an afternoon, he pretended to be the Warrior of Light, rushing into Rhalgr’s Reach to save those they still could. He pretended to be the one fighting and fighting and fighting until the evil empire lost heart. Pretended to be the one standing between Ishgard and the Fell Wyrm Nidhogg.

Pretended to be the one who conquered the Crystal Tower with scientists by his side.

Though that was something he could be after all. Perhaps his best course of action was agreeing to help Chief Biggs after all.

He thanked the children when a caretaker called for them and handed his sword to the Hyuran kid who had said that he wanted to be the one to retake Ishgard. G’raha leaned down, mustered up his best mischievous Seeker grin and put a finger to his lips.

“Keep on training. You’ll make the best city guard this place has ever seen—and once you’re old enough to retake Ishgard and I’m not busy, I’ll come. Every hero needs a sidekick, don’t they?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a quiet but very, very heartfelt "thank you" for the comments on the last chapter; they really meant a lot to me


	6. ACT I

_“I’ll manage,” he says. He’s worn out and tired and upset—I cannot even reach out to comfort him, because he is with the relief effort and I am all but on the run at this point. After the riots in Ul’dah research has gotten harder—between many claiming that it was deserved and the bloodied corpses that were my comrades haunting me there isn’t particularly much I can do while running. The people are scared or actively lashing out. Francel helps those that hide, unable to defend themselves. Before she left for Idyllshire, Joye has seen him outfitted with a converter and a proper weapon—as war efforts by any other name go. Francel, the same Francel who abhorred violence yet would have jumped to his death if only to clear our name. He does so much, and I continue running._   
_He accepts what little I can offer to help him. Ammunition. Rations. I gave him everything I could spare. But still he looks at me with those sad, tired eyes of his. “Brother, don’t you think it might be best to stay in Ishgard rather than run yourself ragged?”_   
_I cannot stop now, I tell him. Not when people have died for this research. Not while there are still people dying in agony._   
_If I have to run to the ends of Hydaelyn and jump into an abyss, so be it._

_SH, 6 UE-VIII_

_“I’ll manage,” he says. He’s a lot more withdrawn these days—despite all that, out of all of us he certainly looks the most content despite his circumstances. I remain on the run, and Aurvael remains with those that accepted Vidofnir’s offer of staying at Anyx Trine. Their number is slowly increasing, and Aurvael uses his airship to collect the people. It brings back almost fond memories of him finding his passion in the Sea of Clouds, how he managed to somewhat turn the tides in House Haillenarte’s favour before he had to abandon the venture. I remember the day he said he wanted the damned airship dismantled, that heavy, choking horror after the Calamity. It changed him, but who would not be changed by having the love of your life die next to you, in utter agony?_   
_He tries to offer his help, but there is nothing he can do other than make certain no one else dies like his late love. He wouldn’t have wanted Aurvael to run himself to death. “Brother, don’t you think it might be best to stay in Ishgard rather than run yourself to death?”_   
_I cannot stay in Ishgard, I tell him. Not when we have found something new about this strange illness that takes and takes and takes until there is nothing left to take._   
_Aurvael looks at me, and for a moment his blank eyes seem to gleam in the twilight. Twelve, I beg you—don’t take anything else from my brother. He already had to bury the man he loved._   
_Don’t make him bury more._

_S H, 6UE-VIII_

_“I’ll manage,” she says. Up here in the clouds the effects are nowhere near as drastic—she’s healthy as she has ever been, unhappy because she is so removed from home where she thinks she is needed. But Laniaitte is nothing if not the strongest of us all. She and her fellows that sought to build relationships with the Vanu Vanu are unharmed up here. The air is fresher than ever, and for the first time in countless turns of the sun I find myself able to breathe._   
_A day with her herbalists and healers, with Laniaitte behind me as if she were a child again trying to hide her insecurities. She has so very marvellously grown out of them. She is and will always be the strongest of us who still live. Having her tap my shoulder and tell me to slow down a little so her people can follow my question… were the times not as dire, I would have managed a laugh and apologised._   
_Laniaitte… says nothing when I mutter my apology and repeat what I was saying._   
_She doesn’t try to stop me when I knock on her door in the evening with my things packed and my next destination in mind. After all, Azys Lla is not far from here and I am rather certain that Biggs and Wedge said they would be there for another day or two. She understands that there are many things that she cannot influence, being as far removed from the world below as she is here. But she knows that she is safe._   
_She is safe. So is Aurvael. So is Francel, now that he joined his brother at Anyx Trine for a month._   
_I’m a horrible older brother for abandoning them all, aren’t I? But I have to. I have to._

_S H, 7UE-VIII_

  
_“I’ll manage,” he says. He looks worse than ever, the same as he did when Chlodebaimt died—I almost wish he had the gall to tell me to stop being the knight he wanted me to be. The knight I never wanted to be, and started my teenage rebellion embarrassingly late. It all worked out in the end, and he understood, but still. It sits unsaid in the room, hangs heavy in the air. Here he is, the oldest Haillenarte, finally acting like the honourable knight that every heir to a high house seems to have been._   
_Most of them are dead and buried now, and I sit in my childhood home, the residence I was raised to take over one day, and remain as much not a knight as I remain a machinist. A knight in the fields of science whose messing with machinery and aether got him his position in Idyllshire. A man who hung up converter and gun and instead took up armour and knife—to protect himself and to cut through plants as if he were an alchemist. What Severian taught me, what his colleagues in Idyllshire continue teaching me I put to use out in the field._   
_He remains stuck in a city coming apart at the seams. I so very desperately want him to go somewhere else, but much like his closest friend, he says he is simply too old to leave the sinking ship._   
_I don’t have the time to stay with him for much longer. Lady Krile requested my presence and my reports._   
_Father looks proud. I cannot remember the last time he looked this proud about any nonsensical step I took in my life._

_S H, 7UE-VIII_

_They all managed, one way or another._   
_Yet somehow it is I who buries them all. Father, Aurvael, Laniaitte, Francel. Old age and exhaustion. Delayed Reaction. Delayed Reaction. Dead on a pike to save some adventurers down their luck._   
_I cannot even bring myself to hate the adventurers. The Warrior of Light was an adventurer down on their luck, yet they saved Francel’s life. Artoirel seems to be thinking the same thing. He doesn’t really say much else these days—but I reckon that is what happens when you bury your entire family and stand over their graves. He did it before, and I was there. Now the people who tried to offer him support all lie buried and I cannot even find it in me to cry; yet Artoirel offers me a place to cry in private away from home should the need arise._   
_With Lord de Borel missing there is naught we can do. Ishgard is burning, crumbling, screaming out for help. Help that we cannot offer._   
_Best to tell the people to flee._   
_For two thousand years she endured the Dragonsong War. To think that it is Black Rose that breaks her._   
_I will rejoin the research group in Idyllshire once we officially dissolve this state. The House of Commons is in agreement. The House of Nobles consists of Artoirel and I. Everyone else has left, though the majority has died to Black Rose or Delayed Reaction. It almost seems hilariously perverse that it would be Aurvael’s airship that delivers their corpses to Ishgard in the week I spent beside our ailing father’s bedside, mere hours after he passed on saying that he so very desperately wanted to see them all one last time._   
_I swear it, I swear it upon their graves—if it consumes my lifetime, fine by me. We will find a way to stop Delayed Reaction. We have to._   
_We’ll manage._

_S_ _H, 8UE-VIII_

* * *

Three days came and passed in relative silence and peace. He tried to ignore how utterly and soul-crushingly tired he was despite getting more than enough sleep. He played cheerful, actually left the room in the workshop to watch the people work, wandered around Idyllshire. He felt a little more comfortable inside the city now, but he could not shake the feeling there was something exceedingly off about those three adventurers that shunned living somewhere safe.

In the moments where he was too dizzy to continue walking he generally stopped to lean against a wall and could not help thinking about these people. It was so strange. It seemed important. But he didn’t have the stamina to get that far again.

On the fourth day, however, G’raha left the room and found very few people were actually present. Instead of the usual thirty or so people donning Ironworks uniforms it were Chief Biggs, two Ixal who were busying themselves with fixing something on an airship, Khasil’a, three Midlanders, a Viera, a Lalafell and a Roegadyn. The Midlanders and the Viera were discussing something with the Ixal, and thus G’raha approached Chief Biggs who was talking to the other Roegadyn, the Lalafell and Khasil’a. Just as he got to them, however, the Roegadyn, Khasil’a and the Lalafell waved to Chief Biggs and hurried off.

“Everything alright?”

Chief Biggs startled a little and turned his head to G’raha. “More or less.”

“That did not sound convincing at all, Chief.”

A long, long sigh. It sounded more exhausted than anything else, but G’raha was not going to let that man off that easily. “’Twould seem we made a grave error assuming that the roaming ones left. Gah, listen to me, repeatin’ what the Sylph said ad verbatim. There’s trouble in the Hinterlands, is all. Best not to stretch your luck and avoid the edges of town today, Master G’raha.”

And with that, Chief Biggs turned and pointed out something to the Ixal, who squawked, waved their tools around and then went about fixing whatever that had meant. G’raha admittedly did not know much about airship construction to begin with, least of all however the technique had evolved since Cid’s time.

He felt entirely misplaced here.

* * *

G’raha traded the uniform for an ensemble of his old clothes and a few new items that the same woman who had given him some Gil to work with had handed him. The boots at least made him seem like a traveller, but it was cold enough for him to wear a simple coat. He did not pull that hood up, through on occasion someone would stop to look at his eyes for a moment and then they carried on as if nothing had happened.

The damned eyes. His pride—his curse. One was Doga and Unei’s parting gift, one was Princess Salina and Desch’s hope that they placed on the shoulders of those that came after. While in the infirmary he had wondered if there had been other illegitimate royals around after the Calamity whose bloodlines survived until the time he wrested control of the tower. If enough of them had been present to undo his lock and seal, to rouse him from his hibernation as beating heart of the Crystal Tower.

It was utterly foolish to even think about this, seeing as Black Rose would have very likely killed him back then. As much as it hurt him to think about all those people that he would never see again, he was surprisingly content with being awake and alive. Even if his heart was a broken and traitorous thing right now. In theory he was free to go wherever he pleased, even if this was a realm that had been ravaged over two centuries. A realm that few people travelled and fewer even survived.

He closed his eyes and turned his face towards the sun. Something that many Seekers did when they were thinking about something or other, something that he had seen plenty of times back with his tribe and in Sharlayan. Considering that he had spent the better part of a year inside the Crystal Tower with the Sons of Saint Coinach and spent his nights going over countless tomes that he or the Warrior of Light had acquired, he could barely remember the last time he had properly done that. Likely after they had returned from the World of Darkness beaten and bruised but very much alive. Yes, that sounded about right—he had turned to face the sun after telling the Warrior of Light he was going to catch up to them, he merely needed to think. It had taken a surprising amount of energy out of him to convince them to go. Standing on top of that tower he had realised just what burden his ancestors and Doga and Unei had placed squarely on his shoulders in that exact moment. A burden he was willing to carry to the bitter end.

He couldn’t really say he regretted it. But this certainly wasn’t what he had expected.

Inside the room full of Allagan relics, G’raha had thrown more than passing glances at some books that seemed out of place. Compendiums that talked about recent history, judging from the titles. He had deliberately and very pointedly ignored a professionally compiled report on the Crystal Tower penned by Rammbroes, had wondered just why exactly Nero tol Scaeva had eventually wound up joining the Garlond Ironworks in earnest. There was one almost comically enormous tome that talked about the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. He had pulled that from the shelf, had been very tempted to open it with trembling fingers—but had instead shoved it away from him. Ignorance was bliss, after all. As long as he didn’t know how the same person who had laughed with him in the middle of the night died he could pretend it had been after a long life of heroics and not in agony somewhere on a battlefield.

He let out a long, weary sigh and turned his gaze back to the road ahead of him.

And nearly jumped backwards with a terrified surprised hiss.

Embarrassingly enough, his ears flattened entirely and his tail puffed up—another thing that allegedly made the Miqo’te easy to read, were the other Spoken of Hydaelyn to be believed. Why was he even freaking out so much at this?

It was just an odd-looking Chocobo chick staring at him with its wide eyes with a strange spiderish robot sitting harmlessly next to it. Probably a messenger of some sort, it hadn’t been all that uncommon back in the day.

He realised a split second later that the Chocobo wore what looked like a rather new Ironworks uniform. So it likely was a messenger for the Ironworks. There, simple enough—why on earth did G’raha feel as if it saw right through him?

He slowly bent down to get on an eye level with the Chocobo; the birds had always been exceedingly intelligent and the little ones like this one were always playful. There was a chance he would get pecked in the face, yes, but as he looked at the Chocobo he realised that much like himself, it bore some rather unusual eyes. They seemed to glow bright blue, just as his red eye had always been described as a freaky glowing red. The machine next to the Chocobo beeped slightly as the Chocobo tilted its head with an inquiring chirp.

The world was starting to turn again, and G’raha squeezed his eyes shut with a slight groan—only to nearly fall backwards when he heard another beep followed by a rattle and words.

“Query: Are you G’raha Tia?”

“Uh… who’s asking?”

The Chocobo raised a wing with a soft kweh, and the machine stomped one of its strange legs. “Repeat query: Are you G’raha Tia?”

Goodness, he _was_ going utterly insane. He raised a hand to his temples when he thought he heard a soft laugh somewhere in the back of his head and nodded. “Aye, that is my name.”

A beep and a kweh, and he opened his eyes again. Of the few people in the streets on this heavily atmosphered day, not a single soul seemed to stop and wonder why the hell the stranger was talking to a bird and a machine—perhaps the bird and the machine were a regular fixture in Idyllshire and G’raha the odd one out. Maybe he was just hallucinating.

He couldn’t really tell, and the fact that he still thought he heard distant laughter when there was no one behind him was making him strongly consider the hallucination point.

The Chocobo suddenly bonking its head against his knee made him snap back to what was going on. The bird seemed to look rather happy as it did that, and it chirped a few times. Not entirely sure what to do in this situation, G’raha decided to lightly pat its head. Another few chirps, a handful beak clacks, all things that Chocobos did.

The machine meanwhile whizzed slightly; it brought back memories of Wedge dragging in a machine he proudly dubbed the Boilmaster one afternoon. He remembered the thing nearly exploding and part of it taking off and smacking directly into the Warrior of Light’s face—the whizzing sound this little thing was making sounded surprisingly similar. Familiar, even.

“Alpha states that it is nice to meet the one friend that was unfindable for all these years.”

“Ah?” He vaguely remembered that name from a report on the Omega case that he had skimmed over. Most of it had gone over his endless doom and gloom whenever he was holed up in the room in the workshop, but something about the fact that a creation called Alpha had helped the Warrior of Light and the Ironworks to take care of Omega had somehow managed to stick around in his memory. In short, this creature was highly intelligent and an ally of his long departed friends. “If you’ve been looking for me the entire time, that… sure has been a long while. My apologies… Alpha, was it?”

“Kweh!” It was loud, cheerful, and it made G’raha laugh softly as Alpha enthusiastically posed for him.

“Alpha states that apologies are entirely unnecessary.”

“Oh! In that case, how about we leave it at it being nice to meet a friend of my friends?” Another joyful warble, and he lightly brushed his hand over Alpha’s feathers again. “Very well. The pleasure is all mine, then.”

The bird tilted its head, its gaze puzzled.

The machine clicked a handful times before finally whirring loudly. “Query: Does G’raha Tia bear the Echo, granting him understanding of what Alpha claims?”

He blinked a few times and shook his head slowly. “I’m afraid not. I may be a Student of Baldesion, but even if I did bear the Echo it never granted me understanding the same way it let the Warrior of Light, Galuf and Krile understand.”

He had envied Krile and Galuf for the better part of his early time around either of them. The way they suddenly and fluently swapped from one language to another and seemed to understand anything and everything in Sharlayan had been amazing to watch. All those languages that clashed there made no sense to him outside of general sentence structure for everything from general Eorzea and Garlemald. While he stood in a corner unsure what to make of it, Krile effortlessly held a long and apparently rather complicated conversation with an Au Ra from the Far East; Galuf not even out of earshot meanwhile was approached by someone who was not entirely fluent in Common and helped them out. All he had done back then was standing in that corner with his tome clutched to his chest and his tail puffed up, feeling somewhat left out until finally they returned.

“I assume the Warrior of Light understood you then, Alpha?”

There was an almost scarily long pause before Alpha nodded slightly.

“The Echo only translates beings with a soul. Lacking one for the longest part, the Warrior of Light did not understand Alpha until the very day they parted. Communication with mortals was done through conveying meaning and reason through motion and sound, as is the case right now.”

He blinked at the machine a few times. “The… translator… thing. The mammet. Was the mammet not with you the entire time?”

Alpha shook his head again, a little quicker this time. G’raha caught a cautious side-glance—apparently there was something that Alpha did not want to share but did not voice anything of the like.

The machine whizzed a little more for a moment. “Bzzt. Audio output equipment was added by the second Chief of the Garlond Ironworks Biggs around the date of his daughter’s 15th birthday.”

He exhaled loudly through his nose and finally stopped squatting awkwardly. G’raha instead sat down in the middle of the road and crossed his arms. Alpha chirped a few more times before sitting down beside him and leaning into his side.

How very odd that the only living being that remembered the same people as he had known once upon a time was a… creation of some sort that had gained a soul over the course of whatever had happened exactly during the Omega-related expedition? It was rather hard to picture it, knowing that the only people that would directly travel to the Rift were Cid, the Warrior of Light, Biggs, Wedge and Nero of all people, all of them led in there by Alpha. He would have to read that report in more detail later once his head stopped throbbing, but still. How very strange that there was a living being from before the Umbral Era that remembered this time still. And said creature had apparently been looking for him.

“I assume we are both some sort of honorary members of the Ironworks, are we?”

“Correct.”

He nodded at the mammet and thwapped his tail against the road several times. The hissing noise was starting up again and his sight was turning strangely blurry the more he blinked.

A few minutes passed in relative silence until Alpha bonked his head into his side and clicked his beak a few times. G’raha turned his head slightly and flicked his ears to signal that he was listening and waiting for a translation.

“Query: Are you feeling alright? You seem rather pale, asks Alpha.”

“Mhm. A tad tired. For someone who slept as long as I, I most certainly am tired… and walking did not wake me. Would you like to return to the Ironworks workshop with me?”

An enthusiastic kweh and Alpha jumping to his feet was enough answer for G’raha and he sluggishly got up.

He wobbled on his feet a little unsteadily and started coughing when he finally managed to stand properly.

“Only tired,” he repeated when Alpha bonked his head against his leg.

He was only tired.

* * *

Sitting in that room was surprisingly less gloomy with someone else around, even if that someone was a centuries-old Chocobo chick and a robot modelled after Omega, as he realised once he opened the report on what had transpired with the machine in the past. Alpha had insisted on him resting, but G’raha had managed to grab the report and said that even in the past he best fell asleep working on something.

Galuf had always carried him to a proper bed, even when the tiny Miqo’te suddenly hit a growth spurt and gained a lot of weight thanks to him focusing on training with actual weapons instead of at least trying out a staff like everyone on Bal insisted he did. The Warrior of Light had started carrying him to his proper bedroll somewhere between finding a way to the Syrcus Tower and the fateful morning that Doga and Unei approached them as they once again stood in front of the door with no way in. G’raha admittedly made some sort of game out of it eventually, stifling some rather unflattering giggles at times. He knew that the Warrior of Light had been fully aware of him being awake and still did it anyway—and then started doing things like flicking his forehead, gently tugging on his ears, or even messing with his tail before leaving for their side of the tent. For a Hyur of their size they certainly managed to be surprisingly gentle. Something that he muttered into their armour one night as they carried him, and all he got in return was a soft laugh.

He quickly turned the page of the report. It was getting harder and harder to think. He was barely able to see what was going on on the page in front of him—it seemed as if someone had drawn something or other, some sort of long creature that might have been mentioned on the previous page.

The hissing had been back for a split moment before everything settled into cold silence again—he swore he had imagined someone whispering his name, because the moment he turned to look at Alpha he remembered that the Chocobo could not speak and the machine could not whisper.

He closed his eyes again with a groan and tried to raise his hands to his temples—instead he found himself doubled over, coughing into his hands hard enough to leave him gasping for breath when that finally subsided. He blearily opened his eyes again, not entirely certain what was going on here.

G’raha stared at his hands for a minute before he understood what looked so wrong about them.

He’d coughed blood.

“Ah,” he rasped—before he could wipe it off, Alpha had moved to look at his hands by jumping on a table behind him. Several tomestones clattered to the floor, every single one of them deafening as if someone had set off an explosive or shot something out of a Magitek Reaper right next to his ears. For a moment nothing happened; then simultaneously Alpha let out a panicked screech and the loud hissing noise returned. G’raha tried to cover his ears with an agonised moan but his limbs refused to do as he bid them do. More clattering behind him; Alpha had likely jumped off the table and ran into his blurry line of sight. Agitated movement and chirps he barely registered as he leaned back against the table did nothing but make his head hurt more.

“Just tired… just tired,” he repeated, and the yellow blur in front of him turned around to shriek something at its translator. The whizzing noise was deafening and something moved—the door opened, but finally he managed to get a hand up to his mouth to cover it. Breathing through his mouth when he had been coughing earlier was not a good idea—he didn’t know exactly how, but covering his mouth at least made him breathe through his nose instead.

He felt something bonk into his leg—likely Alpha, though it was hard to tell.

A moment later the door opened again, and two shapes that were rather clearly Chief Biggs and another Ironworks employee burst into the room. The larger, most likely Chief Biggs blur dropped down beside him and he felt a hand against his neck, likely checking for a pulse. He protested weakly when Chief Biggs instead picked him up.

“Pulse is weak but steady. The sooner we get him the agent the better, I’ll start running towards the infirmary to see if I can catch Tressoix on his way back with the damned thing.”

“Aye, chief!”

Maybe if he closed his eyes he could pretend that Galuf was carrying him back to his room.

“Darn it, Master G’raha,” Chief Biggs hissed as he jogged through the door leading into the workshop. “I thought Khasil’a told you to say something the moment you felt anything strange!”

“Mhm.” He closed his eyes.

“Gah! Come on, stay with me, Master G’raha!” Chief Biggs seemed to start running faster as he said that. “I know it’s tempting, by the Twelve I know it’s tempting—but you can’t just up and roll over dead because of a Delayed Reaction!”

Right, right.

That were the symptoms. Hissing noises. Coughing. Strange soreness or tiredness. He had even read that in that accursed room, written by Krile over two centuries ago. Delayed Reaction and cases of a Forced Rejoining were the reasons why the population of Hydaelyn had wildly and uncontrollably decreased until several people working under the Garlond Ironworks’ banner had managed to develop a counteragent to Delayed Reaction, at the very least. Something miraculous that stopped the creeping death that developed silently and struck suddenly. Something or other about aether and how it flowed through the body. Not exactly G’raha’s strong suit, topic-wise. It had gone over his head.

He muttered an apology as Chief Biggs continued running, and the Roegadyn let out a huff.

“No need to worry, Delayed Reaction deaths are exceedingly rare and are usually newborn children born far, far away from any sort of settlement. You’re not a newborn, and you’re in Idyllshire, and— Tressoix, over here!”

He didn’t really catch what happened next.

But at least the searing pain in his head subsided a little as he drifted off into darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> act 1 is wrapping up next chapter. the idyllshire segment is Almost Over.


	7. ACT I

“Hey! How long are you going to sleep?”

However long he damn well pleased, he wanted to say.

A loud huff. “Haven’t you slept enough?”

Maybe.

“Two bleedin’ centuries is more than enough, wicked white! Get up!”

He furrowed his brows a little, and unfortunately that broke the veil of darkness.

Not that it illuminated much around him—he was sitting in a dark room of what looked a suspicious lot like the Crystal Tower. He could feel it humming and thrumming just at the edge of his consciousness. There was an urgency to it that he hadn’t felt before and it made him frown for a moment before he realised that he was not alone. Of course he was not, someone had to have been speaking.

He groaned slightly and dragged a hand down his face. Twelve preserve him, he felt as if he had gotten run over by a Magitek Engine. Trampled underfoot in the war effort that saw Garlemald pushed back and back and back until they retaliated in the most horrifying way at the behest of an Ascian.

“Anyone would feel _that_ way if they came down with Delayed Reaction and a Rejoining at the same time.”

That snapped his attention back to the person in the room with him. It was hard to make out their features—hells it looked more like a vaguely defined blob than anything else. But there was nowhere else this voice could have come from, and he swore he saw it cross its arms.

“You’re not awake, but we don’t have much time. The Ironworks made certain you would not die from a Delayed Reaction. They were so speedy, in fact, that they nearly got the agent to you before you fell unconscious. Your body is in the infirmary, behind a locked door with someone supervising you from dusk till dawn… and they argued whether to chew your ears off once you awoke hale and whole or not, last thing I heard.”

Finally, _finally,_ the vague shape shifted into something a little more tangible. He was sitting on the floor in the Ocular of the Crystal Tower while another Miqo’te was nervously tapping their foot and swishing their tail around with him. Blue-green eyes, a familiar face, and very short brown hair. They did not stand out like a sore thumb, especially not compared to G’raha himself.

“I don’t have much time to explain _everything,_ unfortunately. But it is a pleasure to finally meet you, G’raha Tia.”

He blinked blearily. “And you…?”

Goodness, his voice was hoarse.

The other Miqo’te flicked their ears, and sighed heavily. “Lue-Nesk. Funny little thing, that name—it had eluded me for the better part of nearly two centuries.”

G’raha blinked a few times, opened his mouth and closed it again. Something was setting off the alarum in his head but he had no idea what and why. Perhaps this was one of the strangest and most lucid dreams he had had since he had woken. Maybe that was—

“Don’t you _dare_ think of this as a dream. You’re endangering yourself like that.”

“H-huh?”

Lue-Nesk dragged a hand down their face with a groan. “Your friends in the past sacrificed their entire lifetimes to making certain neither Delayed Reaction nor Forced Rejoinings got anyone else, and here you are—and haven’t read a single thing other than an explanation. I mean, I understand. Truly, I understand why you skipped reading it. But I’m not here to spare you the heartache, I’m here to end two hundred years of pointless wandering _hopefully_ without dragging you into a delayed grave.”

“Could you… start at the top then?”

“By your Twelve, G’raha Tia, if you weren’t so bleedin’ smart I would consider you dumber than a rail. Alas, you’re the historian on the Source and I’m the farmer from the First. And since you’re the historian, how about you start in the pages of history?”

The gears in his head were turning to the light hum of the Crystal Tower. Delayed Reaction he had names and reasons to pin to. He knew that Delayed Reaction had been researched by a group made of some of the brightest minds Eorzea had had to offer at the time and they had laboured at an extreme cost to create the agent that had apparently saved his life now. There was an offshoot research branch, however, that Krile had personally called into life and had worked with, now that he remembered the vague timeline the Ironworks had given him.

“Krile….”

“Now you’re gettin’ somewhere, historian. What was it she researched again?”

G’raha tried to remember, but his mind completely blanked. His vacant stare as he tried to remember seemed to aggravate Lue-Nesk, who started pacing and agitatedly waving their tail from side to side. It was almost hypnotic to look at.

“She researched Forced Rejoinings.”

“Beg your pardon?”

Lue-Nesk’s ears lowered a little as they let out a frustrated growl. “I swear, historians are the same everywhere. Smarter than everyone yet dumber than even the dumbest livestock. Start from the top, he says—sure, sure. The top.”

All of a sudden their ears sprang back into an upright position as they dropped themselves to the floor. Arms and legs crossed they sat there, and G’raha thought he was staring at an eerie echo of himself back during the time he spent with NOAH. Their tail thwapped against the crystal a few times before stopping with a final feeble twitch—and Lue-Nesk let out a long, weary sigh. Their agitation seemed to vanish and they opened their eyes again with a long exhale.

“As your friend put it eventually in her final reports on the matter, a Calamity is oft accompanied by countless seemingly unrelated deaths in the aftermath. Such was the case after the one with Balamut. Dahamut? The earthquake. The flood. The countless storms, the raging wildfires, all of that. You know your star’s history better than I. But there are clear cases for such deaths. Death by the skies raining hellfire down upon you, drowning, getting crushed by debris shook loose, torn apart by lightning, burning. But in the aftermath, there were always deaths that were hard to attribute. The healthiest dropped dead. Those not going hungry never woke up again. Those that preached hope suddenly fell silent.”

He vaguely remembered reading that in a dusty old tome he had snatched from the shelf. He had been sitting on top of the shelf in the dimly lit library and remained there even when Krile started calling for him from the bottom of the shelf.

“She worked through quite an obstacle; light smothers living things to a standstill. I remember it. Clearly. Those wasting away as their consciousness slipped further and further into that bright abyss… but that is beside the point. Your friend realised what was killing the people in droves on top of Delayed Reaction. What had been killing people for the longest time, since the first Calamity shook your star. The aftershocks of the Rejoining, as slowly but steadily the Mothercrystal stitches together what has been forced back together. Reflections of one another, I think she called it eventually. Every person has a counterpart on another shard. You’re a historian. I was a farmer. Who knows what the others are—beloved heroes, criminals. Kings or beggars. Anything goes, she surmised. But with the shard destroyed, the shard’s counterpart gets wiped out.”

Lue-Nesk shook their head slightly.

“Some had the dubious luck of the Source’s counterpart dying in the Calamity, to Black Rose or to Delayed Reaction. Those vanished quietly and when reborn the soul of that child shone brighter. Others gave up or accepted their lot after searching the Source for their counterpart and finally finding them. Those also quietly vanished, and the souls of those inhabitants of the Source shone brighter. What your friend’s research uncovered eventually was those cases where they refused. Where they fought against their lot. Those who raged, those who did not want to vanish. Those who struggled and struggled and struggled against the allure of their soul’s counterpart.”

G’raha tilted his head a little, and Lue-Nesk exhaled slowly.

“Well, simply put, the mother of all life pulled Her disobedient children by the tail and called them back to Her. All returns to the Lifestream, and those wayward raging souls cannot free themselves from that pull, having been made part of the Source through the Rejoining and all that. Alas, Her call cannot summon the living unless they bear Her blessing. The last ones to bear that both in your world and mine were called Warriors of Light—a singular hero in yours, a group of five in mine. Those that do not bear Her blessing but receive Her call are… dead. Or they die. Disobedient children, one and all called to the Lifestream. In there they forget and quietly join back together because there is a pull between those same souls. That is why I lingered around the Crystal Tower for nigh on two centuries, barred entry by its wall of aether as it stayed locked and you unresponsive, out of my reach.”

G’raha bit his lip. He did glance over a report on Forced Rejoining; Krile had started looking into it after one of the Scions she was close to died suddenly without showing symptoms of Delayed Reaction. He had skimmed it because hearing about Krile had hurt in the same way that thinking about the Warrior of Light did.

Lue-Nesk meanwhile remained solemn for a moment—and then suddenly cracked a lopsided grin that genuinely looked as if he stared into a cloudy mirror that revealed himself. G’raha pinned his ears back, but all Lue-Nesk did was let out a laugh. It sounded… so lively. To think that this Miqo’te was dead….

“Goodness, goodness. You should see the look on your face—as if an amaro pinched your lunch! Worry not, I am not here to cause you trouble. I have tried to catch your attention since you arrived in Idyllshire, and I fear it only contributed to you getting progressively worse… for which you have my apology. Any voices you heard that had no one present were likely my feeble calls for you. Alas, I am a Mystel and not of the fae folk, I have no love for causing unnecessary mischief. Truth be told, for the longest time I did consider quietly fading away once you woke. I nearly did. But there was something about you that made me snap back and make certain that you did not suffer the same way I did.”

He shook his head slightly, not entirely sure what the other Miqo’te meant with that.

“Two centuries is a long, lonely period to spend on your own, watching those you knew slowly fading away one by one, either willingly or unwillingly.”

“I-I’m sorry.”

“No, you needn’t worry. I came to terms with that a long time ago. But not everyone can say that they got to _talk_ to the people bearing the same soul as them. Besides, having watched the Source for so long I learned many of the differences and similarities between Norvrandt and Eorzea. Which, once again, is not something many people can claim. No one remembers Lue-Nesk, however. Lue-Nesk was a farmer who played historian—will G’raha Tia be the historian playing farmer? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But we cannot know what you will do if I refuse to join you and the Mothercrystal calls us to Her side to stitch us back together as the Rejoining demands we be. I learned a lot—it is your turn to make the most of it, however.”

With that, Lue-Nesk got up and walked over. There was a peacefulness in their expression that was almost comforting to look at, and G’raha took the hand they offered. They pulled him up and into an embrace.

“Your friends fought for this world. Take up their torch in their stead, will you? I believe that is what Chief Biggs never quite managed to spit out as he watched you sit in that room unable to cry but about to break down.”

And with that, Lue-Nesk vanished. The thrum of the Crystal Tower slowly vanished as well, and once more darkness swept him away.

* * *

Once more he blearily blinked his eyes open. As of late his life seemed to have been made of awakenings, and somehow he was never alone when he woke. This time, rather than a descendant of an old friend or a piece of his soul that had neatly sown itself where it apparently belonged, it was Alpha who jumped off the nightstand beside his bed and onto the mattress to gently put his head against G’raha’s ear.

The Twelve be his witness, he both felt reinvigorated and utterly drained. He laughed softly and turned his face to look at Alpha properly just at the same time as Khasil shoved the door open and stomped on in with relief on her face and anger glittering in her eyes.

“Well, look who’s back with the living.”

“My apologies,” he rasped as she checked his pulse while Alpha nibbled on one of his ears with soft relieved warbles escaping him. “An old Sharlayan ailment… which makes you ignore clear symptoms because there is no way you are that sick. Not while there’s things to think about.”

Khasil stopped for a moment, her tail twitching as she turned her ears towards him. “That would be the first time I hear of that.”

He breathed out a laugh as his body finally stopped being numb and he slowly sat up. A hand on Alpha’s head, he looked at the other Miqo’te with his ears turned away in shame. “Perhaps because Sharlayan as I remember it does not exist any longer. I am but another relic to be piled in that room full of tomes and reports. In theory, at least. It took me a while, but being stashed away as relic would not quite be something I would enjoy. But for a while I considered myself such and was ready to accept that fate. Alas, it only took a near-death experience for me to realise that I very much intend on living.”

The woman shook her head.

“That does seem to be the general consensus after nearly dying. Your Delayed Reaction was treated, we made certain you are properly hydrated and fed—please, for the love of Menphina, take better care of yourself or I _will_ order you to come here every bloody day for three meals a day.”

He nodded. Alpha clicked his beak and leaned against his side, and for the first time since waking up G’raha realised that he was _alive._ Alive and awake and not a purposeless drifter. There was a reason why he had chosen to shut the Crystal Tower down with him inside, there was a reason why Cid had left notes saying that the Crystal Tower would be integral. There was a reason why Chief Biggs had chosen to open it and talk to its keeper instead of merely demanding use of the tower itself.

There was a purpose to his being here, and G’raha gently brushed his fingers through Alpha’s feathers as he looked at Khasil.

“Thank you. Thank you for saving my life, Khasil.”

She shook her head. “Anyone of my profession would’ve done the same. But you are very welcome, boy, even if you take worse care of yourself than Khasil’a does.”

“How long do I have to stay?”

“Boy,” she let out a long, weary sigh followed by a soft laugh. “Would you truly stick to however much rest I assigned you? I’ve raised children of my own, and I know that look. Please, stay one more night and then you can go.”

* * *

He bowed, hands crossed over his heart, and repeated his thanks. Chief Biggs and the Elezen man called Tressoix both looked embarrassed, but then Tressoix leaned forwards a little to flick G’raha’s ear as he got back up.

“You genuinely needn’t thank me for that, Master G’raha,” he said with a laugh. “I would have run like that for anyone. Not enough people left in this world do, but a little kindness goes a long way.”

G’raha shook his head. “No matter, I am grateful. Both for waking me up and saving my life.”

A dark shadow crossed Chief Biggs’ face as he said that. The man licked his lips, then averted his gaze. “Truth be told, you would have never required saving had we not woken you in the first place, Master G’raha.”

“Either way, you made certain I lived. Despite the fact that I offered you little help you still rushed to see me live. And for that I am truly grateful.” G’raha closed his eyes. “If I may, there are… two things I would like to address. One, my behaviour. I decided I will join your cause—Cid’s research, what little I managed to read of it, has piqued my interest and I would see it through to fruition. I know little of this world and how it works, you require someone capable of controlling the Crystal Tower. I wish to learn more, seeing as I am a historian. That is all I ask and I offer you the Crystal Tower in its entirety in return.”

Chief Biggs’ eyes widened. “Master G’r—“

“Two,” G’raha raised his hand to poke a finger into Chief Biggs’ chest. “Two, I would prefer if you did not call me ‘master’. It is true, I _am_ older than you, but speaking strictly through experience I dare say even a young adult like Khasil’a barely out of the clutches of adolescence has more experience than I. I am not your superior and I would prefer being addressed as you would any of your employees.”

A long pause. The Roegadyn seemed a little hesitant—then suddenly a smile crept onto his face.

“Very well. Welcome aboard then, G’raha Tia.”

* * *

He had been welcomed on the airship to the Great Gubal Library with enthusiastic calls. In a single week of rolling through different history books and sitting out in the open on steel beams that connected machines to be repaired that were suspended from the ceiling he had managed to become a part of the Ironworks. Hells, they had even included him in debates about things. G’raha himself had both burst into loud laughter and choked back tears when they rolled out what they dubbed a Thermocoil Broilmaster, designation some number beyond a hundred that he did not remember. He had managed to choke out remembering one of the first prototypes of this model, how it had exploded and nearly injured the Warrior of Light.

Apparently that had not been a well-known story, and all of them had started to chatter excitedly about hearing a new thing about this legendary hero that… made them a little more human in that regard.

The library itself turned out to be a small town in its own regard. There were about twenty people here on top of the twenty people with Chief Biggs, most of them guards that lived here for the better part of the year. That was how the library had survived that long and it was fascinating to hear how exactly mankind had managed to cling onto life for so long.

But there was something that made him pace restlessly. It made Alpha nervous, it made several other people frown as he paced outside like a tiger in a cage. Eventually Chief Biggs brought down a had on his shoulder to stop him. The man said nothing and quietly handed over a bow and arrows alongside a linkshell, then pointed at the scraggy rock formation that seemed hollowed out beside the river.

“Master Matoya’s cave is there somewhere. We lost track of it over time, but Lady Krile allegedly conducted a lot of her research there. This part of the Hinterlands is fairly safe, but still. Keep an eye out for predators and let us know if you find it just so we know you’re safe.”

He muttered a quick thanks and bolted off.

Yes, as he jogged down the stairs to a surprisingly well-kept half broken bridge, that was what had been bothering him. Master Matoya had stayed in Dravania to take care of the library and other things that the Sharlayans had not been able to take with them. Much like anyone studying there he had heard about her and had been very, very intrigued by both the library and its keeper for a while. Krile had had the honour to meet her, and G’raha already knew that there was effectively no chance to find anyone alive in there. But as he eventually pushed his way through overgrown foliage that grew where it had once clearly been a flooded area, he realised that even just the thought of seeing parts of that past for himself had made him restless.

This place was utterly abandoned and had not seen a visitor in a long time, he thought to himself as he pushed another comically oversized plant out of his way. To think that these things thrived here despite the otherwise banally dead-looking Hinterlands gave the fact that something or other here was not right away. He had heard rumours of the Antitower being hidden somewhere in Dravania, but as he peeked around a corner and saw a dark tunnel leading somewhere, he realised that perhaps it was best if this remained untouched. Quickly reaching for the linkshell he let the Ironworks know that he might have found it and there was not a single living being other than him here. He dipped into the tunnel, only stopping once to brush his fingers across the stone. Something further up ahead seemed to shift at that touch, and G’raha pinned his ears backwards as he continued on.

Master Matoya’s cave had truly been abandoned for a long time. The dust in this place was heavy, had turned everything long grey. There were several brooms scattered about the place, some covered in more dust than others. The furniture was untouched, everything else seemed preserved between the pages of history somehow. There were old books alongside newer ones. There was equipment that G’raha knew mages like Krile used to increase their influence over the surrounding aether, stacks of papers that were scribbled upon in familiar handwriting as he brushed the dust off it. His lips quivered as he tore his eyes away from those papers and turned to instead look around the room more.

He caught a slight movement out of the corner of his eyes and turned into that direction immediately. He had kicked up a lot of dust and coughed gently as he moved forwards.

There was a section here where a single broom flopped in a corner. It had not moved about in a while, judging by the layer of dust on everything there, but the broom itself seemed to occasionally twitch as if it still had the energy to do something.

The corner itself held nothing that immediately caught his attention—a gilded staff was leaning against the wall, covered in dust much like everything else.

He nearly turned back around to look around the room more, but he narrowed his eyes and looked back at the staff once more.

There was a piece of paper attached to it.

Likely just a label of some sort—Krile had been rather meticulous about keeping everything in order in her workplace unless she got heated up. Compared to her he had been the messiest person alive, scattering books and notes all over the place. But his chaos had been controlled; when Krile got worked up about something then she never found things she scattered until she sat down to clean. G’raha’s piles had seemed senseless and pointless but he always knew where everything was at any given time.

Still, he reached for the paper as if he was under its thrall.

* * *

_My dear Raha,_   
_I feel like I should be scolding you. By the time I arrived in Eorzea myself, by the time I dared asking about you, you were already gone. Gone and had gotten yourself wrapped up in some grand story like you always wanted. Gone and sacrificed yourself first before anyone else would have to. I understood yet refused to understand what it was that you were trying to achieve. Heavens, I was so mad. I had lost grandfather, I had lost you. I would lose Minfilia not long thereafter. But as time marched on unrelentingly I started to understand your and everyone else’s choices._   
_There is something that drove you. Some sort of ancient Allagan call. Something that your father and your grandfather and every single one of your ancestors heard but never found the source of. You did. You did, and left a world behind that would fall to ruin. Is it still in ruins, now that you are awake? Does Idyllshire in the distance still stand, or did it burn to the ground as Ala Mhigo did?_   
_Did the Garlond Ironworks wake you after all? I recall Nero saying that perhaps it was time to wake the sleeping prince from his crystal prison not long before he left._   
_Now that I am packing my research here up to return to Idyllshire, I cannot help but wonder who will wake you. Master Cid and Nero, perhaps? Biggs, or his daughter? Or perhaps it was not the Ironworks at all. Who else could pry these doors open that kept you safe?_   
_Those doors that kept you out of my reach. And theirs._

_ To think that the Warrior of Light, vaunted hero of Eorzea, would be the person I share two of my best friends with. I tried, Raha, I tried to convince them and Alisaie to come to Idyllshire. Alisaie died. They buried her. And then Revenant’s Toll was attacked and they paid the final price for everything they ever gave. I know not where they buried Alisaie. I know not where Riol buried them. Just that it is somewhere in Mor Dhona, the same Mor Dhona your crystalline tomb stands silent vigil over.  
You likely wonder why I am addressing this letter to you. I can almost swear I see you frown deeply even if I do not remember the sound of your voice. You would ask me what makes me so certain that this reaches your hands. Easy enough. There are no living beings that would seek anything from Master Matoya’s cave. Everything of value I removed as I set up my research in here. The finished reports are all safe in Idyllshire, as are all her tools and trinkets. Those few that would find this place have nothing to gain here, and the world knows. I deliberately made a big show of it. Something that certainly went down in Idyllshire’s history books as grand event of some sort. _

_Y__ou, on the other hand, are driven by your curiosity. Even though you wished to become a historian who records some of the grandest heroics that ever graced the realm, you are also a creature of extreme habit. Someone who longs for stability. Your eye made you an outcast. You found your home with the Students of Baldesion, but you still left for Eorzea at your earliest convenience. Judging from what the Warrior of Light told me, you found what you were looking for—a_ _nd more_ _. You found your answers, and you found your new place to stay. Yet you traded them for the Crystal Tower having a keeper by the time it would be needed. Master Cid’s research will need it. It will need you.  
I can almost imagine you sitting in a room in Idyllshire with history books and artefacts scattered around you. That was ever your main habitat. Your prowling grounds. Your personal space that you let few people in—as I write these lines, I am glad to be one of the few people allowed in that space. It seems almost funny, knowing that the Warrior of Light sneaked their way into your heart just as they sneaked into mine, into Minfilia’s, into Alphinaud and Alisaie’s. _ _But something tells me that they did a little more to you than merely sneak._

_If history goes the way it always goes, they will be a legend. A legend that you wanted to chart your course after, and now you stand in the silent remnants of a realm reborn. Where once everything rose from the ashes of a Calamity, another Calamity smothered everything. The light you seek, the light of hope, will likely have withered to near death by now. If you awake and find it dead, perhaps it would be best to give up.  
But Krile, I can hear you say, giving up is out of the question. You are, of course, right. Giving up is out of the question if there is something to be saved. But if the people do not wish to be saved, what would be the point? You would be another senseless sacrifice in a history log of senseless sacrifices. Hundreds of pages perhaps past the Warrior of Light.  
_ _Is this realm in ruins worth salvation?_

_That is a call I cannot make. I laboured long and hard to save people. Laboured to understand what went on, what went wrong. I can only hope you are spared the same death as Tataru. Are spared the same agonisingly slow death of bleeding out as Wedge. Don’t succumb to Delayed Reaction where not a soul can reach you like so many people. So many… so many._

_I know this will sound like a parody of something from a past that I barely remember that will still be branded upon your heart. But since you hold this letter, have crossed the wilderness that likely grew out of control once the aether settled a little in favour of balance, I can only hope that this is a realm worth saving. Whether it is or not, the staff you found this letter attached to is yours for the taking._   
_You always protested any attempt of us trying to teach you how to cast. It is true, you do not hold the boundless talent for it that many others do. But you were always clever enough to figure out how to substitute raw talent with intelligent little twists and tricks. That is why every scholar tried to teach you how to control the elements._   
_I am not telling you to use it. I am not forcing you to learn how to cast so many years after I have passed for some reason or another._   
_This staff was unearthed not far from the ancient burial site of the first Doga and Unei. While you never met these two, you did meet their legacy. Became their legacy, if the Warrior of Light’s retelling is to be believed—I believe it. Nero confirmed it in parts, after drinking a lot more than strictly necessary. Another Allagan historian crossed my path not long after a letter reached me that confirmed that Alphinaud was dead. She reminded me of you—a you who awakes in a broken world, holding her head as high as you likely tried and very likely failed._

_Comparing it to other staves of the same buil_ _d_ _, she decided to call this one the Key to the Crystal Tower. Of course it did nothing of the sort, if she even tried to open the doors. Apparently it was made for a prince who never lived to see it entrusted to him. The staff’s name has been lost to the ages, the staff itself has very nearly been lost as well. But she entrusted it to me at my request. Said that her time unearthing Allagan relics has passed and she has no use for it.  
Consider it a last gift from a friend you haven’t seen in ages._

_But at the same time, I must ask you to stop. The historian who found this kept her head defiantly high until the very day she collapsed and died in Lord Stephanivien’s arms while he was still desperately trying to find a way to stop Delayed Reaction in adults. She looked at me and managed to choke out that she regretted not stopping to grieve._   
_Raha._   
_Dearest Raha._   
_Have you stopped to grieve yet?_   
_For me, for Eorzea, for NOAH and the people you knew back in Sharlayan?_   
_For the Warrior of Light?_

_The staff is yours. The choice of whether this realm in ruins is worth being saved is yours. But know that you cannot make a good decision while you push your agony away. Martyring yourself for a cause you do not believe in is not a good idea. That is what we tried to tell you every time you so recklessly charged ahead into another thing that interested you. Please, Raha._

_Let yourself cry._

_I know you will do what you believe in. You have never done anything else. And once you make that decision, I know you will put your energy into it. Whether it is saving this ravaged world, or putting it out of its death throes. Ancient Allag and the Eorzea of the Seventh Umbral Calamity walk with you, even if you cannot see us._

_If the Mothercrystal wills it, we will meet again somewhere, someday._

_I look forward to that day. But until then, I bid you farewell with a heavy heart. Fare you well, my friend. May you ever walk in the light of the C__rystal_ _._

_Krile Mayer Baldesion, 16 UE-VIII_

* * *

He reached for the staff with a trembling hand. Dimly, somewhere in the back of his muddled and racing mind, he recalled reading about an artefact like that, lost somewhere alongside the graves of Doga and Unei. The originals, not the clones that looked at him with such determined, proud and peaceful expressions as they stayed behind to let him and the others escape the World of Darkness. It was covered in dust just like everything else in this room. Yet it shone a familiar gold, the same gold that so pompously covered quite a lot of things in the Crystal Tower.

He dropped the letter as his fingers wrapped around the staff. He pulled it towards him.

G’raha sunk to his knees clutching the staff to himself like a lifeline. A weak whimper escaped him as he sat there for a dazed moment.

Then he pressed his face against the staff. Krile had been right. Krile had always been right—she knew him better than anyone else. He had so desperately wanted to avoid breaking down entirely. If he stopped for too long then it would have broken him entirely. But now that Krile somehow managed to pierce his paper-thin walls that he haphazardly built around him from beyond her grave, he could only sit there sobbing, a staff’s handle pressed into one cheek while tears all but streamed down his face. The whimpering turned into wailing after a while.

By the Twelve, he wailed like a child. Screamed at some point, lamented how unjust this cruel, cruel world had been to the people he wanted to see succeed more than anything else. Screamed over how unjust life had been to Krile who only wanted to protect her friend and family and had all of them taken from her. Cried over the Scions who wanted to protect the realm and saw it fall silent under the cloak of Black Rose. Sobbed for the Garlond Ironworks who sought freedom through technology and wound up the ones to post a hypothesis on how to save this world while never being able to see it come to its conclusion.

Let out a broken whimper for the Warrior of Light, who most certainly had given it their all and then they had been repaid for everything they had ever done with death.

He didn’t know how much time exactly passed as he cried there, but when the tears finally stopped and his entire body felt raw and wounded, he managed to pull himself back to his feet with the staff. Ever since he had woken up his mind had been in turmoil. Khasil had correctly called him out on not eating properly—he hadn’t had an appetite at all. But as he slowly reached for the letter he had dropped to fold it and stuff it into his pockets, he realised how bloody _hungry_ he was.

If he hadn’t already told Chief Biggs that he was going to help them, he was rather certain that he would have said it now when he returned to the Great Gubal Library and the poor man’s relieved smile turned into plan worry. G’raha knew that he was pale and looked plain horrible, but he still cracked a weak smile at the man and held out the staff.

“’Twould seem that as ever, someone else was better prepared than I,” was what he said with his voice utterly hoarse. He didn’t have to say anything else, and the Roegadyn let out a long weary sigh as he put a hand on G’raha’s shoulder.

“Would you say it is time you wound up being the one better prepared, then?”

“Oh yes.” He gently tapped the staff against the floor with that. “It is high time to see if Chief Garlond’s research can truly bring salvation to this realm in ruins.”

**Author's Note:**

> rough timeline of events leading up to and including the 8th Calamity for general reference and a timeframe can be found [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iPlwV1eb4Sefms3SqNsXXI7qUqEYh7OdL9ZyR0Iy6jg/edit?usp=sharing)!
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/cleignewheat) | [tumblr](https://aethercurrent.tumblr.com/)


End file.
